jducoeur

Time to bring The Review of Obscure Books out for once -- this one's definitely less-known. I picked up The Short While some time back (I probably backed the Kickstarter). I got around to finishing it tonight, so let's give it a look.

tl;dr -- quiet, personal-scale speculative fiction, less about the "science" and more about how people and cultures evolve. Not exactly gripping, but quite good.

This is a pretty big graphic novel, well over 400 pages, and doesn't follow simple conventions. It's not all comic-book style -- much of the book is more illustrated text, interspersed with straight-up comics, as fits the story of the moment.

It's very, very personal. It's the story of Paolo and Colin, who enjoy a sweet, loving relationship until the day that tears them apart, following their story both before and after.

It's set in the future, although how far isn't at all clear, nor very relevant. (I'd say at least fifty years, but beyond that it's hard to say.) Thirty years ago, the Administration, a somewhat brutal totalitarian regime, finally fell. Since then, people have been slowly figuring out how to put the pieces back together.

This isn't a "post-apocalyptic" story -- it's not interested in being anywhere near that melodramatic. It's clear that a lot of people have died, the weather isn't great, and the technical underpinnings of our current time have largely decayed, but it's by no means a hellscape. Folks are filling into the buildings that are left, and figuring out where to rebuild; they're repurposing the leftover tech, including taking old sexbots and putting them to better uses. Communities rise and fall, not because of cataclysmic drama but just because People.

That's the world that Paolo and Colin live in, and there's nothing all that weird or bad about it to them -- it's just life. The story is more about their relationship; both of them somewhat complicated men, but whose love works until trauma finally drives a wedge in between them.

The story is told quite elliptically, often taking a detour of a dozen pages to talk about their youths, or their parents' history, or their other lovers, or the backstory of the past decades. It's less like a carefully-constructed novel, more a story being told about some friends, filling in the relevant details as they come up.

It's a very good book. One of the pull quotes calls it a "thriller", and I don't agree -- while that key moment is a bit horrifying (and the trauma of it recurs through the story), this is a much more contemplative story than that word implies.

The world-building is fascinating -- really not very interested in fancy science, more about how people pull together and rebuild after things somewhat break down. The most interesting ideas are mainly about culture, reminding us of how complicated that always is, never falling into neat boxes. (Even the nasty Administration gets rather more nuanced as we learn more about it.)

It's a smart novel, and it expects a lot of the reader: there are a lot of characters and a lot of backstory, not all of it spelled out explicitly, but it makes sense as the story wends its way down the months and years.

Obviously, heavy on the queer content -- our protagonists are gay, and the majority of the other folks they spend time with are as well. That's not even remarkable here: queer phobias seem to have taken a back seat in this future culture.

The main content warning is for physical violence (the trauma at the center of the tale); there's also a bunch of implied horrors in the backstory, albeit mostly at a remove from our main characters. This is a world pulling itself together after some very bad times, but those times still resonate.

Overall, worth reading if you'd like something quiet and thoughtful -- notionally science fiction, but about the people far more than the gadgets.

Time for a new installment of The Review of Obscure Books! This is my (at this point pretty occasional, but long-running) review column of comic books that I think deserve more attention than they are getting.

During our recent vacation (about which, more in a later post), my evening reading was Destiny, NY. I had backed Volume 3 on Kickstarter, mostly on the grounds of "that looks like it might be interesting". I'm glad I did -- it's a winner.

The story takes place in a world that is very nearly our own. It is a world with magic -- but only a little bit of it. Magic isn't secretive a la Harry Potter: not only is it public, there's even a federal agency dedicated to regulating it. But it's pretty rare, and the average person in the street isn't necessarily sure that it's even real. Perhaps the most conspicuous part is the Seers, folks with mild precognitive abilities. Their visions are sometimes good, sometimes not so much; sometimes reasonably clear, often far from it.

Sometimes a Seer identifies a kid with a capital-D Destiny -- the truly important thing that they will do, that will define the meaning of their life. And that is where Destiny University comes in: a school prepares them to fulfill that Destiny.

And that's where we get to Logan McBride. Logan was a "magical girl", a child with a Destiny. Which she fulfilled at age 13. Now, it's 15 years later, and she still doesn't quite know what she is supposed to do with the rest of her life, wrestling with the depressing knowledge that she peaked as a child -- she had one important day, and then it was all over.

Now, she's just found new love in her girlfriend Lilith. And her ex-girlfriend (and still friend) Gia has gotten details on her own Destiny, to kill "the most ancient evil" -- who is, unfortunately, Lilith.

Suffice it to say, it's complicated, and there is more going on than shows on the surface.

The first volume stands reasonably on its own as a novel, but the story really comes into its own in the later volumes, as the unexplored plot threads from the first story trace outward. It becomes more of an ensemble story, and shows its strength as it explores more of the characters, ranging from "gangsta barista" Trinity to would-be-Potter Joe. (Who covers a 15-year-old's insecurity with all the braggadocio in the world.) With the exception of a Chaos God who might be just plain EEEEVIL, pretty much everyone has depth and motive. Relationships grow and change -- enemies become allies, sometimes even friends, and the closest relationships can break on a bad moment.

It's all terribly real, and that's important. The story is about 15% magic, 10% suspense, and 75% relationship drama, but it never devolves into soap opera. Rather like Sunstone (one of my favorite books of recent years), I find myself liking and caring about these characters a lot, and that matters to me more than almost anything else in a graphic novel.

There have been three books so far, which I've picked up electronically. When the Kickstarter for the fourth comes out, I plan to pick up the entire series in paper -- the first e-book I've cared about enough to make that jump. Each volume is a well-defined story, advancing the overall arcs (by now, there are a lot of arcs going on), and each ends with a whole pile of short stories, each fleshing out one of the characters.

Plain and simply, it's great -- a book that understands how to use genre in service to human storytelling, not instead of it. Highly recommended...

Welcome back to The Review of Obscure Books, my occasional-but-long-running series of reviews of comics that could use some special attention. Having finally finished it last night, some thoughts on a story that is very much not obscure: Marvel's recent mega-crossover Secret Empire. No, I'm mostly not talking about fight scenes -- ultimately, this is about modern politics -- but there's a lot of superhero trope to wade through before I get to the interesting stuff. If that's a turn-off, just skip this one and move on to my next review. (Probably soon.)

A high-level overview of the main plot helps to explain why a lot of people freaked out really badly when this started:

• Due to all the screwups in SHIELD in recent years, Steve Rogers (Captain America) is appointed as its head.
• There occur a set of near-simultaneous crises, nationwide.
• Congress gives him broad emergency powers.
• He reveals himself to be a lifelong sleeper agent of Hydra, and begins immediately converting the country to fascism.

Okay, when you just see that, it's a huge WTF???!!!?? The reality is a lot more complicated, though, and the payoff fairly interesting.

Let's get the silly bits out of the way first. What's really going on here is that the Red Skull (Captain America's arch-nemesis) managed to lay hands on a Cosmic Cube (Marvel's official Uber-MacGuffin, capable of altering reality more or less however you like). Having finally twigged to, "If you can't beat 'em, get 'em to join you", he engineers a magnificently Kafkaesque rewrite of history:

• Steve Rogers was traumatized by the death of his mother when he was young.
• He swore to do whatever it took to protect the people.
• He was taken in by Hydra, and during WWII was one of their greatest agents.
• When Hydra was on the verge of winning WWII (I assume there are Germans involved here somewhere, but they mostly talk about Hydra), the sneaky Allies got their hands on a Cosmic Cube, and rewrote history themselves so that they were winning.
• As part of that, they turned Steve into Captain America, but not before Hydra planted a sort of sleeper spell on him.

So to Steve's new POV, he has always been Hydra, and is essentially waking up from a bad dream of fighting for the wrong side. This person -- let's call him Hydra Steve -- is very much not our Steve Rogers.

The crossover as a whole is, at best, a mixed bag. There are some genuinely good stories in there: this is a "life in wartime" epic for Marvel, and has a lot to say about fascism and politics and stuff. But there was also a lot of Dumb, and wasn't entirely helped by being so earnest. I mean, Secret Wars was idiotic, but it reveled in its own ridiculousness, and managed to fit a lot of silly fun in its kitsch. This one would have been much stronger if they'd limited it to the writers and stories that had both the talent and enthusiasm to really tackle a harder tale.

Anyway: in the end, the various heroes manage to bring "our" Steve back to reality; he fights Hydra Steve (yeah, yeah -- Cosmic Cube lets you do nonsense like this) and wins; yay, freedom prevails. So much for the superhero bits.

But the payoff (and the reason it's worth talking about) is the final issue, Secret Wars: Omega. As so often, the best comics aren't fight scenes, they are issue-long conversations. This one is what happens when Good Steve confronts Hydra Steve in prison.

The beautiful hell of it is, Hydra Steve is not a villain. Quite the contrary: somewhere mid-story, he executed the Red Skull, his supposed ally, precisely because the Skull was very much a villain. By his own lights, Hydra Steve is, without the slightest doubt, the hero in this story.

The thing is, he's still Steve Rogers -- but he's a Steve Rogers whose life was slightly different, and thus whose priorities are different.

Since the 1980s, Marvel has been very clear that Captain America cares about people, and would give his life to protect them, but his highest priority is Freedom. (The original Civil War, much more clearly than the movie, was primarily about that.)

Hydra Steve doesn't oppose Freedom per se, all other things being equal -- but his highest priority is Protecting the People. And that little difference of priority, followed through, turns him into a true-believer Fascist (and, largely, Totalitarian). He is trying to build a world where the people are safe and happy, and he believes that requires imposition of Order. But he is quite sincere that Order is merely a means to an end, and to him the assumption of power is genuinely a burden (he spends a fair amount of Secret Empire agonizing over it) -- but it's what he needs to do in order to protect the country from itself, so he does it. He was groomed to be, essentially, a good King, and he's going to fulfill this responsibility.

Moreover, he is genuinely angry with Good Steve, and with the Avengers, for their weakness. He is more than happy to point out The Superhero Paradox: that if you aren't willing to stop the bad guys -- and by this, he means quite permanently -- then you are complicit in their later crimes. He lays the deaths of a lot of innocents on Good Steve's shoulders, because The Avengers Don't Kill.

And because of the way the story is structured, Good Steve and Hydra Steve literally cannot agree on history and facts. Hydra Steve knows perfectly well that he has lost (for now), and that he is living in Good Steve's reality, but he also knows to the core of his being that this reality is a corruption of the "real" one that he comes from.

Most damning, he points out (semi-accurately) that he has committed no crimes -- worse, the people welcomed him. He was handed power in full accordance with law, and when he rolled Hydra out as, essentially, a nationwide paramilitary political party, hordes of people flocked to him. He restored their pride, promised them protection, and gave them a sense of unity in something greater. He knows, and says quite explicitly, that this is his real victory: that Good Steve may have won for the moment, but the next time things go wrong, a lot of people will begin to remember the greater dream of Hydra. It is not at all clear that he is all that defeated, in the end.

Yes, it's ferociously creepy, and the metaphor is as dense as a fruitcake, but it's beautifully on-target. I often note that the silver lining of our current political moment is that at least we wound up with as inept a fascist as Trump in the White House: a greedy idiot whose ideals can be summarized as, "MineMineMine". But Secret Empire envisions the opposite: America being seduced by a brilliant, charismatic and idealistic fascist, who is far more effective. It's a story worth keeping in mind -- while we like to think that we are simply Good and they are simply Bad, it looks very different from the other perspective.

So -- despite all the above, I can't actually recommend reading Secret Empire. It's loose and sloppy, full of the stupid, with way too many threads and a story that is baroque even by Marvel standards. But there is a central spine in there that is utterly relevant to our times and very well-designed. I suspect that the same story, told in a tenth as many issues with a tenth as many plots, could have been truly great...

"Life is like a book, son. And every book has an end. No matter how much you like that book, you will get to the last page, and it will end."