The Great Reread: Hobart Floyt & Alacrity Fitzhugh

May 14, 2025 / Rick Ellrod / 2 Comments

Too Many Books

Picture of old man on ladder in large library

Can one have too many books? I want to say no. (See the illustration, which hangs on our front hall next to the library.) On the other hand, it’s become difficult to fit my accumulated collection comfortably into any reasonable home—and doubly so when you add in my wife’s lifelong collection as well—even without the eight or ten boxes of books I sold off to the fabulous Wonder Books in Frederick in an attempt to thin out the collection. And nonfiction is another story. (Well, the stories are in the fiction section; but you see what I mean.)

This is so even though I’ve tried to exercise restraint by buying only those books I’ll want to read over again. I prefer to try out a new book by getting it from the library, and, after reading, to decide whether this is a “keeper” that I always want to have available. The rare exceptions are new books that I already know I’ll want to own, generally in a series. While Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga was still coming out, for instance, I’d grab those off the bookstore shelves at once, sight unseen. (Though I admit I do have only an electronic copy of Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen—but that’s another discussion.)

Aside from considerations of space, it occurred to me some years ago that the “read again” rationale necessarily diminishes over time. Given my likely lifespan, how many times am I likely to reread any given volume? That number is constantly decreasing. This makes me a little cautious about buying new books—as opposed to using the library. One of the great perks of my current job is that there’s a county library branch right on the first floor of our building. I can put a book on hold and nip down while at the office to pick it up. Same thing to return it. A wonderful arrangement . . . at least until I retire . . .

The other motivation I’ve had for accumulating books has been a vague notion that they serve as a kind of reference library. In writing posts like these, it’s convenient to be able to grab a favorite book to check on some point or to make a citation precise. For years, I kept around an old paperback copy of Neil Jones’s The Planet of the Double Sun (1931, paperback edition 1967), merely as an example of a really crummy old-time SF yarn. It finally occurred to me that there was no particular purpose in having it—rereading it would be too boring to be worth any use I might make of the mention—and I ditched, er, released my copy to find a new home with some historian of SF. Haven’t missed it since.

The Great Reread

In the process of going over my packed-and-unpacked-and-reshelved books (two moves in the last two and a half years!), I’ve sometimes found it hard to recall what some of the stories were actually like. Or I feel as if I’d like to read a book once more before I consign it to the outermost depths. So I find myself rereading a lot of old material. Some of it holds up pretty well. Others, I wonder what I saw in the tale in the first place. The rereads end up being a combination of final trial—do I want to keep this book?—and fond farewell.

Of course I continue to read new stories too: new good books are coming out all the time. But it’s rather enjoyable to revisit some old friends as part of a balanced bookish diet.

And sometimes the old stuff may be worthy of comment. So I’m going to include the occasional post here from the Great Reread. The inspiration comes from Jo Walton’s brilliant series of essays, “What Makes This Book So Great,” originally hosted, I believe, at Tor and published in a 2014 collection. (There seems to be a list of links here; Walton’s own comments on rereading are here.) I’m not spotlighting what are necessarily the greatest books—but there may be interesting things to say even about the non-great or non-classic tomes I find cluttering my shelves.

Since these books tend to be fairly well aged, I don’t think it’s necessary to issue spoiler alerts in each case. The comments all have spoilers.

Brian Daley’s Peripatetic Heroes

I first ran across Brian Daley (1947-1996) in his 1977 novel The Doomfarers of Coramonde, which has the irresistible premise that a sorcerer in a fantasy land summons magical assistance from another world—and it turns out to be an armored personnel carrier, with crew, from the war in Vietnam. The fish-out-of-water contrast was delightful and the action first-rate. I was primed to look for more good fun a few years later when Daley published Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds (1985), the first in a trilogy of adventures featuring the mismatched buddies Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh.

They’re still good fun. The heroes are both likable and relatable—dashing and mercurial Alacrity, a knockabout itinerant spacer with “friends in low places” across the starlanes, and staid Hobart, a minor bureaucrat from a congested backwater Earth. Alacrity has some personal issues to get over, mostly in the third volume, but Hobart develops most, rising to the occasion as he travels into space to obtain a bequest inexplicably left to him by an interstellar magnate. The worldbuilding is brilliant: planet after exotic planet, oddball character after still odder character. The sheer variety and colorfulness of Daley’s cosmos is pleasing.

The Floyt-Fitzhugh saga falls into the category of the “picaresque” tale. Originally I misunderstood that term to mean the same thing as simply “picturesque,” and the story certainly is that. When I actually looked up the word, many years ago, I realized it had a more specific meaning: “Characteristic of a genre of Spanish satiric novel dealing with the adventures of a roguish hero,” as Wiktionary puts it. That fits our heroes pretty well—Alacrity from the start, Hobart learning fast. They’re lovable rogues, often on the wrong side of the law (or at least local customs), with hearts of about 12-carat gold. Even in the last scene of the series, they’re off again to who knows where, one jump ahead of pursuit.

And thereby hang my possibly idiosyncratic reservations about the story. The plot of the first book is very good; there’s a clear goal and climax. In the second and third books, not quite so much. Alacrity and Hobart achieve some interesting results, but they themselves don’t actually stop to absorb or enjoy them. Our Heroes are always on to the next thing. Daley gives each of them a pretty good romance subplot, but these never quite resolve, since the MCs are always leaving their girlfriends behind—even at the end of the third book, Fall of the White Ship Avatar. I was left wondering, do these two ever get to settle down and enjoy the fruits of their labors?

This is a standard issue with wandering, picaresque heroes, particularly those who star in open-ended series. Daley even lampshades this aspect by including a whimsical journalist in the story who features Floyt and Fitzhugh in a series of utterly melodramatic “penny dreadfuls,” to Our Heroes’ perpetual embarrassment and annoyance. Daley seems to want to place them in the company of series heroes whose adventures never really end. James Bond is never going to stop secret-agenting; he just gets re-cast with increasingly younger actors. At the end of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, just when we might expect Indy to retire and be replaced by his son, Indy snatches back his rolling fedora at the last moment. The ending of The Incredibles or Spider-Man 2 show the characters resolving their personal character arcs, but nonetheless leaping into the next adventure.

One wonders if these perpetual adventurers ever retire, even as they inevitably age. We’ve pondered this previously in considering the “professional hero.” There has been the occasional hero who explicitly retires and passes on the mantle to a successor. There’s a neat little story in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City showing how superhero Jack-in-the-Box is training his successor. And Captain America eventually retires in the MCU, though the ‘line of succession’ is rather fraught.

Personally, I like to see the main characters settle down at some point, if only to enjoy a well-earned respite from perpetual danger and damage. They can continue to have interesting adventures later on; “happily ever after” need not be a static condition. Consider, for example, the somewhat atypical honeymoon of Miles and Ekaterin Vorkosigan in Diplomatic Immunity. But it’s satisfying to see beloved characters enjoying some degree of stability.

On the other hand, there’s also a certain appeal to the hero who’s eternally “out there,” a legendary figure, always at their peak and unabatedly themselves. In a way I don’t want to see Nero Wolfe or James Bond retire. So I do rather appreciate the perpetual motion of Floyt and Fitzhugh, despite the lack of resolution. To resolve, or not to resolve? That is the question—but either answer may be acceptable. I’ll be keeping the Daley books on my overstuffed shelves.

The Professional Hero

July 23, 2023August 13, 2023 / Rick Ellrod / 5 Comments

Glory Road

A couple of comments by Kevin Wade Johnson in connection with my last blog post (now a long way back!) triggered a line of thought about heroes and the hero business.

Robert A. Heinlein’s 1963 novel Glory Road looks like a swashbuckling fantasy at first blush, but it turns into something entirely different. Our hero, E.C. “Oscar” Gordon, kicking around the world after leaving the military, is recruited by an incredibly gorgeous woman to assist her with a quest that involves traveling to other universes and swordfighting. This is just the kind of adventure he was craving.

As Kevin observes, the first three-quarters of the book are action-adventure, with sizable side dishes of comedy, scandalous liaisons, and cynical social commentary. At that point the quest is fully resolved—at page 208 out of 288, in my copy. What, then, occupies the rest of the book?

Gordon returns with “Star,” the beautiful woman he’s now married, to her home universe. It turns out she’s the empress of a multiuniversal polity that is in some respects a high-tech Utopia. All Gordon has to do is relax, allow himself to be fêted by the population, and sleep with anyone he finds interesting (the late Heinlein’s polyamory is fully on display here).

He hates it.

What Utopia doesn’t satisfy is Gordon’s lust for adventure. He doesn’t want to be a dilettante or a “kept man.” He wants wonder, excitement, the stimulus of danger. He likes being a hero, with all the occasional discomforts and perils of that role. The placid happy ending of a retired hero holds no attraction for Gordon.

It’s unclear whether Star feels the same way. She’s willing to consider going in on a kind of adventuring “business” with her slightly tarnished knight. But first, she says, she’d have to train a replacement for her unique position—and that would take many years.

The solution is for Gordon to head off again on the Glory Road without Star. He’ll pop back in now and then, but not to take up residence in the Twenty Universes utopia on a permanent basis. He and Star will remain in love with each other, perhaps, in some sense of the term—but not in a sense that requires fidelity on either’s part. In Heinlein’s polyamorous world-view, passing romantic involvements are just part of the adventure: “Knights errant spend their nights erring” (p. 271). Gordon’s happy ending is the continuing adventure.

The Unsettled Adventurer

This idea comes up from time to time in adventure stories: the hero (or heroine) who seeks out danger and isn’t content without it. John Carter of Mars displays a little of this, though in the violent world of Barsoom, he seems to be able to get his fill of trouble while still remaining home-based with the enthralling Dejah Thoris in her city of Helium. There’s something like this idea in the conclusion of The Good Place—boredom with utopia—as we’ve seen.

The really extreme case can be found in an old-time fantasy by E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (1922). The swashbuckling nobles of Eddison’s imagined world fight the good fight against their sinister enemies, the Witchlanders. At the end of the novel, those adversaries are conclusively defeated. Cue the victory feast. And yet . . . Our Heroes are not quite satisfied. Things just won’t be as interesting without the Witchlanders constantly scheming and warring against them. At the very end, the heroes’ fanciful wish is somehow granted: a herald announces the arrival of an emissary from the bad guys—the same event with which the novel opened. (Hence the title: the legendary serpent that swallows its own tail.)

The Series Protagonist

I’ve previously expressed some doubts about whether happy endings really need to be static and boring—so let’s not adopt the Glory Road doctrine too hastily. (In its extreme form, Eddison’s circular epic, one may feel the opposite dissatisfaction in the sense that all the heroes’ striving and suffering has been for nothing.) But these examples highlight a difference among types of action heroes.

In a long-running action series, unless a hero is improbably falling into one adventure after another against their will, we have to assume that the hero likes what they’re doing. James Bond seems to be pretty content with his secret-agent life. Indiana Jones yearns for opportunities to climb out the window of his stuffy professorial office and strike out on some treasure-hunting chase—even at an advanced age, as we’ve recently seen. Captain Kirk, who’d been promoted to admiral by the beginning of Star Trek II, isn’t suited for a desk job. At the end of the three-movie cycle he’s demoted to captain again—ostensibly as a punishment for flagrant violations of Starfleet regs, but we’re to see this as a step forward for him, his best destiny. Yoda accuses Luke of this kind of unrest in The Empire Strikes Back: “Adventure! Excitement! A Jedi craves not these things.”

The same is true of almost all superheroes. Retirement is almost unheard-of. The occasional counter-example makes for an interesting tale precisely because it runs against type: Hank Pym in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Jack-in-the-Box in Astro City. In a somewhat similar way, continuing campaigns in Dungeons & Dragons or similar games tend to assume the existence of a class of professional adventurers who enter willingly into a life of battle and treasure-hunting, as distinct from an assembled-for-one-purpose group like the Fellowship of the Ring.

This character trait does make things convenient for the writers. They have a believable rationale for the main character’s continuing adventures. Otherwise, after a while it would start to seem implausible for one person to keep getting drawn into danger purely by accident.

The Hero By Trade

The Star Trek captains, and other officers, illustrate a type of case where the character really is a professional hero—one who’s taken up a profession or vocation where danger and challenge, and hence the opportunity for heroism, come with the territory. Anyone pursuing a military or quasi-military career fills that bill. Honor Harrington, for example, reflects more than once that she’s good at war; it’s her calling, what she was born to do. Professional police officers, firefighters, or rescue workers—first responders generally—also fall into this category. (John McClane of Die Hard fame, mentioned above, is in a danger-prone profession, though it’s probably rare for a cop to run into the kinds of major crises he does.) Unsung heroes like medical personnel may find themselves in the same position. They may not categorize what they’re doing as heroism (it looks better on them if they don’t); but they are putting themselves “in harm’s way” where acts of heroism are constantly called for.

This is why military SF lends itself so easily to long-running series like Honor Harrington’s. (The same is true outside the SF genres, as we can see, for example, in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin sea stories.) The same is true of private detectives, secret agents, and the like.

The Reluctant Hero

But not all heroes are professional heroes. An equally perennial favorite is the reluctant or accidental hero—the person who answers the call to adventure, but does wish to return to a peaceful life afterward.

Jim Butcher’s Introduction to Jim Butcher & Kerrie L. Hughes, Heroic Hearts (NY: Ace Books, 2022), puts it this way:

Real heroes . . . [are] the everyday humans who happen to be standing there when something bad happens, and when there is a sudden need for skill, courage, or intelligence. They’re the regular people in irregular circumstances who find themselves considering others first and standing up to do whatever needs to be done.” (p. xi)

Some do manage to go back to their ordinary lives after the crisis has passed. Cincinnatus, and George Washington, are famous for pulling off the transition: they took over the reins of the state when they had to, but willingly ceded power afterwards. On a more modest scale, the “citizen soldier” concept, as in the American National Guard, aims at the same thing. It’s part of the mystique of the American World War II armies, the so-called “Greatest Generation” model. You rise up to serve when necessary, but happily return to civilian life when it’s done. Contemporary discussions are more likely to emphasize post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the difficulty of the return to civilian life; but it remains an ideal with considerable drawing power.

In fiction, the contrast between heroic acts and ordinary life provides rich soil in which to grow interesting stories and characters. Tolkien, for example, gives us some characters who do manage the return to everyday existence—Sam Gamgee—and others who find it impossible, such as Frodo. Of course Frodo does in the end find peace in Valinor, but that requires a literal removal from the circles of the world, a transcendence not available to the average hobbit-in-the-street.

The situations can become fairly complex. In the Song of Roland, after the heroic deeds of the story are finished, a weary Charlemagne at the end finds himself called back unwillingly to new conflicts. In the TV series Chuck, the eponymous Chuck Bartowski is initially appalled to find himself embroiled in spy activities, but the sheer coolness of it all grows on him, and by the fifth season he wants to start his own secret-agent business. Scott Lang (Ant-Man) at the beginning of Quantumania is resting comfortably on his laurels, and has to be dragged back into action in the name of helping others.

Detectives in mystery stories fall into both camps. We have professional private eyes like Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe. But then we also have amateurs like Chesterton’s Father Brown and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, who always just seem to be in the right place at the right time.

The Author’s Choice

If we want to write a heroic adventure story, one of the early decisions we have to make is what kind of hero we want to feature. Sometimes the tale may call for someone who’s automatically in a position to encounter danger, like a military officer. Sometimes we may prefer to drag the hero into action against their wishes, or by happenstance. The whole point of Roger Thornhill’s predicament in North by Northwest, for example, is that he has no desire to become involved in skulduggery and is baffled by the strange things that are happening to him. Like so many other accidental heroes, however, he rises to the occasion. This is a narrative arc that may be both more interesting and more inspiring than that of the professional hero; because most of us live relatively ordinary lives and can only hope that if called upon, we too could become the kind of hero we admire.

Tell Me What You’re Doing

October 13, 2019 / Rick Ellrod / 4 Comments

Shakespearean Description

A few years ago my kids gave me a copy of The Jedi Doth Return—or, in full, William Shakespeare’s The Jedi Doth Return: Star Wars Part the Sixth, by Ian Doescher (2014). This little book is a retelling of the movie Return of the Jedi in the form of a Shakespeare play, with the entire text in iambic pentameter.

It’s great fun to see the swashbuckling space epic transformed into sixteenth-century poetry. And the reading is surprisingly good as well, with some memorable phrases bringing out nuances not necessarily detectable in the movie; at least one passage was striking enough to make it onto my Quote of the Week page back in 2017.

But one thing in particular caught my attention, perhaps because of the contrast between SF subject matter and Shakespearean technique: how frequently the characters describe in words what’s happening. For example, in Act I, Scene 3 (p. 25), Leia sneaks into Jabba’s palace to rescue Han Solo:

In stealth I move throughout the palace dark,
That no one shall bear witness to my acts.
Now cross the court, with footsteps nimbly plac’d.
Ne’er did a matter of such weight depend
Upon a gentle footfall in the night.
Put out the light, and then relume his light—
Aye, now I spy my goal: the frozen Han.
Thy work is finish’d, feet. Now ’tis the hands
That shall a more profound task undertake.
Quick to the panel, press the needed code.
O swiftly fly, good hands, and free this man
From his most cold and undeservéd cell.
O true decryptionist, thy codes are quick!
The scheme hath work’d, the carbonite doth melt.

She’s narrating what’s happening, in just the fashion of a true Shakespeare character (“What light through yonder window breaks?”). Of course, if she were actually saying this aloud, she’d have roused the whole palace; but of course the Shakespearean convention of the inaudible (except to the audience) soliloquy is also in effect.

This self-description seems to be even more necessary in an action sequence. When Luke peels off from Leia to pursue Imperial scouts in the landspeeder chase through the forest (Act III, Scene 1, p. 77), along with stage directions, we get a similar blow-by-blow account:

LEIA: ‘Tis well. Be safe, and I shall see thee soon.
LUKE: [aside] O sister, all my thanks for tender words.

[Luke falls behind, alongside
Imperial Scouts 5 and 6.

Now shall this bike’s keen blaster find its mark!
I shoot, and one is dead; the other next.

[Luke shoots and kills Imperial Scout 6.

LEIA: I shall fly high o’er this one’s bike, that he
May think that I have fled. Then shall I from
Above make my attack. Ha! Now beside
His bike, surprise is my sure strategy.

[Imperial Scout 4 shoots at Leia.

Alas! My bike is hit, and off I fall!

Reading this as a book, the narration helps me figure out what’s going on (and helps me visualize the appropriate scenes from the movie I know so well). Of course, if I could see the play actually performed, some things would be clearer. Still, a stage play can’t provide all the visual background we’d get in a movie. I have no idea how they’d depict the land-speeder chase on stage—though I’d like to see them try! Maybe it’s the shortage of visual imagery that requires the dialogue.

But it’s not quite that simple.

The Comic-Book Monologue

In an old-style comic book, we also see characters providing a lot of description. The villain doesn’t just whip out his infernal device and fire it at the good guys; he’s also likely to announce something like, “Now, tremble before the power of my unstoppable Meson Beam, as it suppresses the strong nuclear force and disintegrates your very molecules!” Here’s an example from Fantastic Four #52, the first appearance of the Black Panther (1966):

Sometimes a quantity of prose is expended on a mere landscape scene, as with this magnificent Kirbyesque high-tech jungle shot.

Why all the verbiage? The trouble is, the special effects alone doesn’t tell us much. In primarily visual media, we don’t get internals or narrator comments. A genius like Reed Richards may be able to figure out instantly what an exotic weapon is doing, but we poor readers can’t. Even in a non-action scene, the implications of the Panther’s “jungle” might not be obvious without having someone to explain.

Of course, as the first panels above illustrate, wedging all this dialogue into an action sequence requires another convention, as arbitrary as the Shakespearean soliloquy: “talking is a free action.” We are simply to accept the notion that a character can deliver a lengthy speech while taking split-second actions. The expository lecture is more plausible when cruising through a landscape, as in the second image.

When my brother Matt and I were working on our great unfinished comic-book epic back in grade school, we faithfully replicated this convention, allowing a hero to get off an appropriately heroic declaration while a roof is falling on his head. (Apologies for the black-and-white shot; I don’t have the full-color original ready to hand.)

Not all graphic novels use this convention. It may not be as common in manga, for example, where there’s a lot more action without explanation—and where, as a consequence, I sometimes have trouble figuring out what’s going on. This discrepancy may reflect a cultural difference; I didn’t grow up with Japanese comic culture and may be missing some clues. Still, I think it’s harder to make out events without the occasional verbal aside. In the Sailor Moon manga and anime, for example, if there’s any dialogue at all that relates to a superpower, it’s likely to consist in calling out an attack name like “Moon Princess Halation,” which by itself communicates even less than “magnetic anti-polarity.” I’ve encountered some similar problems reading contemporary American graphic novels like Monstress.

On-Screen Obscurity

Visual media have some advantages in being able to show directly what people are doing, depending on the medium. However, the audience for a stage play is likely to be at some distance from the performers, which means that very small actions may be hard to make out. If a character on stage is, say, picking a lock, there will probably have to be some setup to make clear what they’re going to do (especially if the locked door is invisible and not actually part of the stage set). In a movie, on the other hand, the director is free to show the character crouching next to the door with her tools, then cut to a close-up shot of her hands working the tools in the lock, then back out to the door opening. Comic books can do the same thing.

This assumes we already understand what picking a lock is. The need for explanatory narration is accentuated in science fiction and fantasy stories, where the things that are happening may be extraordinary. When the action is more mundane, we can get by with less explanation. If the villain fires a pistol at the good guys, we don’t need to be told how a pistol works. But if the action uses superhuman powers or advanced technology that we haven’t seen before, an explanation may still be necessary.

By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35276332

Consider Marvel Comics’ Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff). Her powers originally consisted rather vaguely in casting a “hex,” which caused things to go wrong (in unspecified ways) for the target of the hex. Later retcons and expansions introduced a number of different power sets. But in the Marvel Cineverse movie versions, her powers are hardly explained at all. We may see her blasting Thanos, but we don’t actually understand (even in the lenient comic-book-movie sense of “understand”) what her powers are supposed to be. For all practical purposes, she might as well be Sailor Moon. (Now there’s an idea for a crossover . . .)

As always, there are good and bad ways to supply the necessary explanations. As I’ve mentioned before, the original Star Wars is good at this: Han can snap out the line “. . . while I make the calculations for the jump to lightspeed,” and that’s all we need to know. On the other hand, there’s what Shamus Young describes as “Super Exposition” in a 7/6/17 blog post: “The villains blabbed their plans for no reason. Heroes narrated their own actions to themselves, out loud, during a fight. Characters would stop and explain why something was good or bad right in the middle of it happening, because the writers didn’t set anything up ahead of time.” Overdone, the practice falls into condescending overexplanation.

On the whole, the different media seem to require different types and levels of exposition. In a purely verbal medium like a book, when we have only the words to work with, every action must be described. On stage, at least some forms of presentation describe the action verbally as well. And even in a movie, where we can see what’s happening in detail, we may still need to have the events analyzed.

Ends of Eras

May 27, 2019 / Rick Ellrod / 16 Comments

Part of the journey is the end.
—Tony Stark

“The Saga Comes To An End”

We have a lot of extended stories coming to a close this year. At this writing, eleven years of Marvel Cineverse movies have concluded with Avengers: Endgame. It won’t by any means be the last Marvel movie—we’ll see many of these characters again—but the overall story that began with Iron Man in 2008 has reached its end. The TV series Game of Thrones released its finale on May 19, 2019. In December, we anticipate the conclusion of the Star Wars trilogy of trilogies (The Rise of Skywalker).

On the book side, David Weber’s Honor Harrington series (she first appeared in 1992) arrived at a conclusion of sorts with Uncompromising Honor (2018). There are plotlines still unfinished, and Honor herself may reappear in later stories, but it seems clear her personal narrative arc has closed.

Even a blog post by the FCC’s General Counsel, of all things, has given a nod to this convergence of endings.

I’m going to assume it’s coincidence that these sagas of different lengths are finishing up together. It does seem like a good moment, however, to reflect on what the resolution of these stories says to us.

(Miraculously, this post seems to have managed to avoid any actual spoilers for Endgame. But please note that the links, if you follow them, are full of spoilers.)

“A really long story”

The fact that we have all these long-running series, by itself, brings up some topics that are familiar in this blog. For instance, it confirms that readers and viewers of our own era are not as lacking in attention span as pundits might claim. An article by Douglas Wolk, the weekend of Endgame’s release, was titled: “Americans crave complex ideas. Just look at the Marvel universe.”

Wolk credits Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, back in the 1960s, with bringing extended stories spanning multiple magazines to comic books. He notes also that such vast tapestries draw us together by giving us shared topics to talk about: “to be drawn into conversation to understand them better”—to share reactions, insights, theories about stories that “mean more to us together than alone.” I can testify to this, as a veteran of many an animated office conversation on what was so good about Captain Marvel or whether people were satisfied with the ending of GoT.

A wide-ranging story also satisfies our appetite for visiting a fully-realized world. This is the value of what Tolkien called “Escape” in his pivotal essay On Fairy-Stories—the refreshing sense of leaving our ordinary world temporarily behind to immerse oneself in a new and different world. It was Tolkien who (in the Foreword to The Lord of the Rings) gave his primary motive as “the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story”—but who is also one of the great worldbuilders.

The Craving for Epics

But these aspects mostly reflect the sheer size of the saga. More to the point, perhaps, is that many of us also share an appetite for what we might call the epic: a mighty struggle in which one side is clearly fighting for something worthwhile, and gains some success, as distinct from a tragedy.

Not everyone has this taste: some of us prefer more limited stories about individual people’s fates (for example, in the romance genre), or stories that disdain the whole good-versus-evil business as insufficiently gray. And some massive sagas fit the epic pattern better than others. Game of Thrones is notorious for its ambivalent characters and refusal to grant unambiguous victories. Still, from what I hear, the finale did at least bring the Westeros civil war to an end, and (mirabile dictu) many of the more decent characters survived.

Mark Ruffalo (who plays the Hulk), discussing the Avengers movies, said:

You also see the power of storytelling. One thing I think about these movies that’s really exciting is they’re forward-leaning in the narrative of good versus evil. We’re able to transcend some of the divisive narratives that are happening now. (Quoted in Anthony Brezican, “All for One,” Entertainment, April 19/26, 2019, p. 20.)

It’s fascinating to hear a good-versus-evil narrative described as “forward-leaning,” after so many years in which such stories have been derided as passé. But the remark has further implications. It matters how things come out in the end—good, bad, or mixed. And this means there has to be an ending in which some kind of resolution occurs.

Letting a Story End

I can’t really evaluate a story until I’ve seen how it comes out. I’ve seen stories that were pretty off-putting in the early stages, but managed to redeem themselves at the end. And I’ve seen some that seemed promising, but ended in a way that ruined everything that had come before. One is reminded of the ancient adage about a human life: “Call no man happy before his death, for by how he ends, a man is known” (Sirach 11:28; Aristotle discusses a similar statement by Solon in Nicomachean Ethics I.10). Since a person’s life is a story, the connection makes sense.

That a story needs an ending might seem a truism if it weren’t that we have lots of stories that don’t end. For example, comic books and soap operas (“daytime drama”) go on indefinitely, as long as people are willing to read or watch. The occasional subversion of this pattern is noteworthy for its rarity—for example, the story in Kurt Busiek’s Astro City comic where a costumed hero called Jack-in-the-Box, himself a son who has taken on his father’s hero identity, deliberately trains a successor to take over the role (“Father’s Day,” in Astro City: Family Album (1999)).

In more conventional literature and movies, we find other timeless, perpetual characters. The irascible detective Nero Wolfe figured in tales spanning the period from 1934 to 1975, without major changes in his age or situation, despite the major changes in world events and American culture over that time. The character’s fixity is actually kind of appealing; it seemed odd when a later Wolfe book written by Robert Goldsborough shows Wolfe’s sidekick Archie Goodwin using a computer in place of his trusty typewriter. Similarly, P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster survived innumerable scrapes and confusions from 1923 through 1974, with similarly unsettling chronological consequences (Bertie encounters a protest march in one of the later books). In the movies, James Bond has eternal life, though actors may come and go.

But barring these iconic perennial characters, a series that goes on indefinitely without an ending—or past its ending—is in danger of becoming humdrum. When Anne McCaffrey started her Dragonriders of Pern series in 1967, the charcters were fighting the periodically recurring scourge of “Thread,” but aspired to find a way to end it once and for all. In All the Weyrs of Pern (1991), they actually accomplished that goal. That wasn’t the end of the stories; almost twenty other Dragonrider books have been published since by McCaffrey and her children. But I found that I lost a good deal of my interest once the driving force of the original plot ended. It was always pleasant to visit Pern, but the motivation of an ongoing plot was absent.

This may be a personal predilection; it may account for why I have difficulty staying interested in a TV series for very long. The exceptions occur where the ongoing character or story arcs are sufficiently compelling to keep me engaged. The Good Place, for example, achieves this by turning into a quite different kind of story in each of the three seasons so far, but with continuing characters who still seem to be reaching toward an end. Chuck succeeded in a somewhat similar way, but the original premise was clearly played out by the last half-season; it was a good thing the series ended when it did. When even a major movie comes across as “just another episode,” that’s a buzz-killer for me.

Closure and Continuation

Theatre critic Ann Hornaday focused on the virtues of conclusion in an excellent article upon the release of Endgame. One such virtue arises from the very existence of an overall arc, and the associated worldbuilding: “When contemporary experience seems to be composed of narratively nonsensical shocks to the system, the attraction of coherent, well-constructed alternative realities cannot be underestimated.” Moreover, a good long story can engender a powerful sense of fulfillment, of achievement, from the closure of an appropriate ending. It’s worth keeping mind that the word “end” means not just where something stops, but also a goal toward which we strive. A fitting close is a good thing even if the ending also involves dealing with death—“absence and interior loss,” as Hornaday puts it.

As noted above, the conclusion of an iconic hero’s story is unusual enough that to see such a character retire and reach an end is both somber and refreshing. We hate to see them go, but if they’ve lived a full life, we feel a kind of elegiac nostalgia.

This works best when the world goes on, but new characters take over—just as in real life. It won’t surprise anyone that some of the heroes in Endgame do reach their ends; others continue. Honor Harrington retires, but her successors will carry on while she finally enjoys the fruits of a well-earned victory. As readers and viewers, we ought to be willing to let a beloved character go. This reluctant release may be echoed in the story itself. When one of the characters in Endgame tells another that it’s okay for them to go, it reminded me of what I said to my own mother, at the hospice staff’s suggestion, when she was ready to die.

While we love our heroes, the hero’s journey does have an end (which need not be death; the cited Wikipedia page labels it “The Crossing of the Return Threshold”). We need that fitting closure to make a good story.

Is it unrealistic to expect neat endings that wind up lives, or at least careers? Not really. The wise Sam Gamgee was right to suggest that the great stories never really end (The Two Towers, Book IV, ch. 8); and as Bilbo said, “the Road goes ever on” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, ch. 1). But the episodes, the substories that make up those grand tales, do have their moments of closure.

We do achieve or complete things, sometimes. We go through high school or college, and then graduate (mostly). After a courtship, we marry—which starts a new story. Elsewhere I’ve quoted Alasdair MacIntyre to the effect that in Jane Austen’s novels, marriage occupies the place of death in real life—an ending we don’t move beyond. Yet we do move on; and the milestone event is no less an achievement because another phase of the story continues afterward. “Each happy ending’s a brand new beginning.” We need both closure and continuation.

This duality is most prominent when one person’s arc winds down and others begin. It’s not just one story with its phases and milestones, but a vast array of overlapping stories. Everyone has a story, and they are all woven together. “In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else had been directed” (Perelandra, ch.17).

So we celebrate the closing of these mighty sagas, and we look forward to the new stories that will follow them.

Of Amazons and New Gods

October 8, 2017October 9, 2017 / Rick Ellrod / Leave a comment

Wonder Woman is now out on DVD. Still a great movie. It’s pleasing to see that the DC Extended Universe (“DCEU”), or “Justice League Universe,” can produce a film on a par with the best of the Marvel movies. I’m cautiously looking forward to Justice League, which opens just over a month from now (Nov. 17). Among other things, I’m eager to see whether the group movie will be dominated by its immediate Wonder Woman predecessor, or by its less promising Batman–Superman heritage.

On re-watching, I found myself thinking more about the theology of Wonder Woman, which enmeshes us in some complicated assumptions about the shared world of the DCEU and may give us some clues about JL.

Fallen Pantheon

According to the Amazons of Themyscira, the Greek war god Ares took umbrage when Zeus created human beings. When Ares turned humans against each other, the other Olympian gods tried to stop him. Ares killed the other gods, last of all Zeus, whose dying blow put Ares out of action for ages. Diana kills Ares in the conclusion of WW. That appears to eliminate all the Olympian gods.

As moviegoers, we readily accept this Greek-myth theology for purposes of the story. It’s familiar territory, as mythology goes. While we’re watching the movie, we don’t worry about reconciling Zeus’s creation of humanity with, say, Christian or Hindu or Muslim accounts, or even with the scientific account of human evolutionary origins.

One thing that makes the Greek gods (I keep typing “Geek gods,” which is peculiarly appropriate) easier to swallow is the fact that in WW the pantheon seems to have liquidated itself, unless you count the demigoddess Diana. By the end of the movie, they’re gone. We don’t need to worry about whether Athena or Poseidon will turn up in some other superhero story as a deus ex machina, or why DC universe inhabitants can’t call on Zeus to aid the victims of floods or hurricanes.

On the other hand, Justice League takes place in the same universe, which means the premises of WW are built in. How literally are we to take them? Do we have to assume that the Greek gods are (or were) the divinities of the DCEU?

Divinity and Technology

Comics have drawn from all sorts of Western mythologies, but they generally skirt the issue of whether any of these gods are God. None of the deities of Greek/Roman or Norse myths have the classic characteristics attributed to God in the Western tradition: omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence. The issue is directly addressed so rarely that the occasional occurrence is rather startling. In Fantastic Four #72 (March 1967, p. 13), for example, Sue Storm refers to “the all-powerful Silver Surfer,” and the Watcher responds: “All-powerful? There is only one who deserves that name! And his only weapon . . . is love!”

Marvel dodged the theological question neatly when it brought Thor into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). He brings with him the Norse gods of Asgard, just as in the comics. But Thor expressly tells us in his first movie that the magic or “divine” powers of the Norse gods are indistinguishable from advanced science (Clarke’s Third Law rides again). This allows us to regard the Asgardians as just highly advanced creatures, using knowledge so far beyond us that it seems like magic, and bypass theological conundrums.

It’s certainly open to DC to take the same approach, if we don’t take the “Zeus created humanity” claim seriously. Since the Olympians are (as far as we know) now absent, we can probably skate around that issue without trouble.

In fact, the absence of the Olympians may actually lead into the Justice League scenario, in an unexpected way. The clue is that the full cast list for JL on IMDB shows “Steppenwolf” as the villain. Surely the heroes are not clashing with the 1960s heavy-metal band by that name. Who’s this mystery supervillain?

The Fourth World

Jack Kirby, famous for inventing many classic Marvel characters during his long partnership with Stan Lee, left Marvel for rival DC in 1970. There he created, wrote and drew a new epic series, sweeping across at least five different lines of comic magazines, known as the “Fourth World.” In this saga, loosely connected to the rest of DC’s continuity, Earth becomes a battleground for two groups of supernal beings: the benevolent “New Gods” of “New Genesis,” and the corrupt denizens of its dark sister world “Apokolips.” New Genesis and Apokolips exist in a parallel universe or “other dimension” reached via temporary portals called “Boom Tubes,” not unlike the Rainbow Bridge in the Thor movies.

Like Marvel’s Asgardians or DC’s version of Greek mythology, these beings are “gods” only in a limited sense. They have powers beyond those of mere humans, but are far short of all-powerful.

What’s interesting for our purposes here is that Kirby conceived of the dualistic Apokolips-New Genesis regimes as arising after a kind of Ragnarok—the cataclysmic end of the world in Norse myth. In fact, as Wikipedia’s discussion points out, Kirby’s New Gods grew out of an idea that he originated for Thor comics. For purposes of this new DC-sponsored saga, it was disconnected from the mythology of Thor. But the same basic trope remained: a final battle in which both good and evil forces are destroyed, succeeded by some kind of post-apocalypse revival. Here’s how Kirby presented it in Orion and the New Gods #2 (April-May 1971, p. 1): “the holocaust which destroyed the old gods split their ancient world asunder — and created in its place two separate and distinct homes for the new forces . . .”

Apokolips and New Genesis

Steppenwolf

The master-villain of the Fourth World saga is Darkseid, one of the best bad guys of all time. Marvel’s character Thanos, who happens to be the master-villain of the MCU (appearing briefly in Guardians of the Galaxy and the Avengers movies), was based on Darkseid. Darkseid’s uncle, and lieutenant, is one Steppenwolf, who in the Fourth World comics rekindles the conflict between Apokolips and the New Gods by killing the New Genesis leader’s wife (Orion and the New Gods #7, March 1972). The opponents seen in this Justice League trailer are Apokolips parademons.

DC still owns the New Gods characters and plotlines. It seems likely that Steppenwolf will be the main antagonist in JL with the still greater menace of Darkseid looming behind him, available to up the ante for sequels (as with Darth Vader and the Emperor in The Empire Strikes Back, or Ronan and Thanos in Guardians of the Galaxy).

The New Twilight of the Gods

At this point, the fall of the Olympian gods in Wonder Woman begins to line up rather neatly with the Kirbyesque background that Justice League will draw upon. Kirby thought of the Fourth World as following on a Norse-style Ragnarok. But, as noted above, the Wonder Woman cosmogony provides the DCEU with a Ragnarok of its own. Perhaps in the movie version of the mythology, the New Gods (and their opponents) arise from the twilight of the Olympian gods, not the Norse.

Darkseid

It’ll be intriguing to see how this background influences the JL movie—if at all. DC may decide to duck the whole matter and introduce Steppenwolf as a menace with an entirely different origin. But my money is on a significant Fourth World influence on the upcoming film. If the DCEU makes good use of Darkseid and the Kirby mythos, that ups the chance that we may see some seriously epic developments, after a rocky start, in the DC shared universe.

We’ll see shortly!

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