So What Are you Reading?: Generations
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THE JUDGE CHILD by John Wagner, Alan Grant, et al
A 2013 reprint of the Judge Child Quest from 2000AD’s Judge Dredd, in this case in an A3 sized paperback, in which the reprinted comics pages take up about the middle two-thirds of the A3 book page – which means it’s about at the limit for my eyes to read without a magnifier…
Still, it’s a good set of classic Judge Dredd, with plenty of spaghetti western style action as Dredd hunts for the the child prohesied to guide Mega City One through a future disaster. There’s great villainy from the Angel gang, and also the debut appearance of franchise regular Hershey.
The art is supplied by Ron Smith – always my favourite Dredd penman – Brian Bolland, and Mike McMahon. The story’s a recognised classic f the franchise, and it still holds up. A nice – if somewhat eye-straining – blast from the past.
A 2013 reprint of the Judge Child Quest from 2000AD’s Judge Dredd, in this case in an A3 sized paperback, in which the reprinted comics pages take up about the middle two-thirds of the A3 book page – which means it’s about at the limit for my eyes to read without a magnifier…
Still, it’s a good set of classic Judge Dredd, with plenty of spaghetti western style action as Dredd hunts for the the child prohesied to guide Mega City One through a future disaster. There’s great villainy from the Angel gang, and also the debut appearance of franchise regular Hershey.
The art is supplied by Ron Smith – always my favourite Dredd penman – Brian Bolland, and Mike McMahon. The story’s a recognised classic f the franchise, and it still holds up. A nice – if somewhat eye-straining – blast from the past.
Ellery Queen's A Study in Terror.
Two-thirds of the book is a novelization of the Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper movie (which I have not seen), a pastiche of the Watsonian style by an uncredited Paul Fairman. There's also a framing sequence by the Queen writing gestalt about Ellery Queen (the fictional character) receiving Watson's manuscript under mysterious circumstances while he's writing his latest book and he becomes so engrossed in the book that he provides the real solution to the Jack the Ripper murders.
I have two thoughts, one on each part of the book.
First, the Ripper murders in the novelization bear almost no relation to the actual Ripper murders. You can read this book and learn absolutely nothing of use.
Second, Ellery Queen, the character, is a bit of a knob. He's Encyclopedia Brown as a mic-century Manhattan playboy.
Add a third. It's not really much of a mystery due to its small cast problem. Maybe that's simply a feature of Ripper fiction; Gotham by Gaslight has the same problem.
It was entertaining, but I also put it down for two days and didn't care. I've read better.
Two-thirds of the book is a novelization of the Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper movie (which I have not seen), a pastiche of the Watsonian style by an uncredited Paul Fairman. There's also a framing sequence by the Queen writing gestalt about Ellery Queen (the fictional character) receiving Watson's manuscript under mysterious circumstances while he's writing his latest book and he becomes so engrossed in the book that he provides the real solution to the Jack the Ripper murders.
I have two thoughts, one on each part of the book.
First, the Ripper murders in the novelization bear almost no relation to the actual Ripper murders. You can read this book and learn absolutely nothing of use.
Second, Ellery Queen, the character, is a bit of a knob. He's Encyclopedia Brown as a mic-century Manhattan playboy.
Add a third. It's not really much of a mystery due to its small cast problem. Maybe that's simply a feature of Ripper fiction; Gotham by Gaslight has the same problem.
It was entertaining, but I also put it down for two days and didn't care. I've read better.
As it happens, I've finally gotten around to rereading the actual complete Sherlock Holmes collection that I got for free on Kindle. At the moment I'm two stories into Memoirs. I'm reminded of how artificial the writing style was -- every time a character narrates their story to Holmes and Watson, they narrate as if they were a prose author telling a story, complete with quoted dialogue and colorful descriptions. Sometimes they even quote someone else telling them a story in the same way, with quotes nested within quotes within quotes, flashbacks within flashbacks. It's very contrived. Although I suppose we can assume that Dr. Watson was streamlining and embellishing the witnesses' accounts for the benefit of The Strand's reading audience.
What's interesting is how much more animated and expressive Holmes is than I remembered. I grew up watching Jeremy Brett's version, and got the sense of Holmes as a cool, reserved figure (though Brett could be quite expressive in his own way), but the character in the prose comes off as warmer and wittier, for all his talk about disdaining emotion for pure logic. I actually find that imagining Holmes's lines in Jonny Lee Miller's voice works quite well -- although since Lucy Liu would never fit, I've ended up, strangely enough, mentally pairing Miller as Holmes with Martin Freeman as Watson! (My mental image of Watson is closer to Edward Hardwicke, but Freeman has a much more interesting performance style. Plus I wanted to imagine them closer to their actual age in the stories, in their prime rather than middle-aged.)
This is the second time in my life that I've read the Holmes canon, and amusingly enough, both times were on electronic media. The first was in The Library of the Future, a CD-ROM collection of classics from the mid-'90s, OCR-scanned with many errors and an awkward font and page format. It's much more comfortable reading it on my phone's Kindle, and I assume the text is more accurate, though I have found the odd OCR error like "T" for the pronoun "I" and "son" for "sort."
What's interesting is how much more animated and expressive Holmes is than I remembered. I grew up watching Jeremy Brett's version, and got the sense of Holmes as a cool, reserved figure (though Brett could be quite expressive in his own way), but the character in the prose comes off as warmer and wittier, for all his talk about disdaining emotion for pure logic. I actually find that imagining Holmes's lines in Jonny Lee Miller's voice works quite well -- although since Lucy Liu would never fit, I've ended up, strangely enough, mentally pairing Miller as Holmes with Martin Freeman as Watson! (My mental image of Watson is closer to Edward Hardwicke, but Freeman has a much more interesting performance style. Plus I wanted to imagine them closer to their actual age in the stories, in their prime rather than middle-aged.)
This is the second time in my life that I've read the Holmes canon, and amusingly enough, both times were on electronic media. The first was in The Library of the Future, a CD-ROM collection of classics from the mid-'90s, OCR-scanned with many errors and an awkward font and page format. It's much more comfortable reading it on my phone's Kindle, and I assume the text is more accurate, though I have found the odd OCR error like "T" for the pronoun "I" and "son" for "sort."
Only the second time?
Personally, I've got the Ballantine TPBs of A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, the Berkley TPBs of The Valley of Fear, His Last Bow, and The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. And in between? Castle's The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes. It's been years since the last time I cracked any of them, but I've probably gone through all of them at least half a dozen times.
(And I'm rather partial to Basil Rathbone, myself.)
* * *
Now? Jeremiah. To be followed by Lamentations, Baruch, and (with one of the earliest recorded UFO sightings, not to mention the inspiration of a popular song about bones) Ezekiel.
I've often wondered: if you printed the complete text of the appendix/sequel to Jeremiah onto a big sheet, then sealed it between two layers of plastic, would it then be "laminated Lamentations"?
"Ezekiel saw the wheel. This is the wheel he said he saw."
-- Jack Webb, from the open to Project UFO.
Personally, I've got the Ballantine TPBs of A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, the Berkley TPBs of The Valley of Fear, His Last Bow, and The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. And in between? Castle's The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes. It's been years since the last time I cracked any of them, but I've probably gone through all of them at least half a dozen times.
(And I'm rather partial to Basil Rathbone, myself.)
* * *
Now? Jeremiah. To be followed by Lamentations, Baruch, and (with one of the earliest recorded UFO sightings, not to mention the inspiration of a popular song about bones) Ezekiel.
I've often wondered: if you printed the complete text of the appendix/sequel to Jeremiah onto a big sheet, then sealed it between two layers of plastic, would it then be "laminated Lamentations"?
"Ezekiel saw the wheel. This is the wheel he said he saw."
-- Jack Webb, from the open to Project UFO.
As far as reading the complete original Doyle canon, yes. It's something I've been wanting to do again for decades, but I never managed to get hold of a sufficiently complete collection until recently.
I watched all the Rathbone movies a couple of years ago and was pleasantly surprised by how superb Rathbone was in the role (though let's not talk about Nigel Bruce). But he, like Brett, was way too old for the character as described in most of the original stories. Holmes and Watson are only in their 20s in A Study in Scarlet; Watson has just ended a brief and inglorious military career, and Holmes is of an age to be mistaken for a medical student. (Information from "His Last Bow" puts Holmes's age at 27 in Scarlet.) There seems to be a considerable time jump between that and The Sign of the Four, but quite a few of the short stories are set between the two novels. (Although there is a fairly early one in Adventures where Watson refers to himself and Holmes as two middle-aged gentlemen, which implies 40s; a quick web search suggests that while Victorian fiction often considered women middle-aged in their 30s, a different standard was applied to men.)
It wasn't a "UFO sighting," because the concept didn't exist at the time. It was a metaphorical vision that, according to Wikipedia, "reflects common mythological/Biblical themes and the imagery of the Temple." But modern UFO theorists tried to retroactively reinterpret it to fit their own biases rather than trying to understand what it would have been intended to mean in the context of the time, which is bad historiography, serving only the desire of modern observers to twist history to suit their own agendas. (Although it's true that modern UFO sightings are manifestations of the same kind of psychological and cultural phenomena that underlay previous eras' visions of divine beings and demons; they're reflections of the same kind of hallucinatory/ecstatic imagery, beliefs, fears, and archetypes, but filtered through a Space-Age point of view.)
Just starting on The Higher Frontier by @Christopher
He saw something (physical or aphysical, we can't know; we weren't there), that was airborne, and that he could not identify (and could barely wrap his mind around); if there's anything beyond that to the definition of a "UFO sighting," I'm not aware of it. Besides which, just as in Jack Webb's line (following an ominous orchestral quote from the spiritual, "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel"), "Ezekiel saw the wheel. This is the wheel he said he saw" (you could practically hear the touch of sarcasm in his tone), my tongue is always firmly in my cheek in so-referring to the opening chapter of Ezekiel.
At any rate, to achieve exegesis (and avoid eisegesis), whether it's of a scriptural text (e.g., Ezekiel), or a legal one (e.g., the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), we must of course always consider the historic context, but we must not be bound by it. I'm reminded of a passage in a ST novel (possibly Ford's The Final Reflection, or maybe Diane Duane's Spock's World, or maybe something else), involving Biblical instructions on what to do when it is time to evacuate one's bowels. And I'm also reminded of certain Jewish groups who choose to be willfully ignorant of the fact that in a pre-germ-theory era, a kosher diet was health food. And of certain Christian fundamentalists who prefer the KJV not because of the linguistic beauty, and not because "pisseth against the wall" may very well connote more than just adulthood and male gender (this year, I found a couple of commentaries I'd never read before, suggesting that the phrase connotes a lack of refinement, among other things), and not because ". . . and on Earth Peace, goodwill toward men" sounds better than ". . . on Earth Peace, among those whom He favors," but because they honestly believe that everybody in the Bible spoke Jacobean English.
There's plenty beyond it -- the larger cultural context in which the idea exists. A context that started with post-WWII Americans whose years of training to watch the skies for enemy aircraft was left without a focus and thus produced a nationwide hysteria over weather balloons and lenticular clouds, and that evolved into an entire pseudo-religious mythology built around taking sci-fi imagery of spacemen and embracing it as literal truth. It's a term that's deeply grounded in the culture and psychology of the 20th century, and thus it's inappropriate to apply it to a far earlier era. It just gets in the way of understanding a symbolic writing that was entirely in keeping with standard religious metaphors of the day.
I think that's just the way Jack Webb always sounded. Though I haven't seen Project UFO since I was a kid.
Of course not, but that doesn't require buying into UFO nuts' attempts to force Biblical texts to fit their modern craziness. We should be open to a range of ideas, but in the marketplace of ideas, some are worth buying and others should be steered well clear of.
I'm finished with From History's Shadow and 91% through my reread of The Crimson Shadow.
Although I like "Carbon Creek," "Assignment: Earth," and other 20th-century Earth stories in Star Trek, From History's Shadow was just not my jam. I did not really connect to any of the Certoss or humans of the era, and the 23rd century scenes seemed a bit too frequent for their actual importance to the story. If you like UFO history or 50's-60's military undercover stories, then you may enjoy this one much more than I did.
The Crimson Shadow, on the other hand, is better than I remember it being. It is especially refreshing to see someone who truly cares about his people coming into power and the candidate who appeals to the worst impulses of the population missing out on power. Much has been said about how well McCormack writes about Garak, and this is very true. She also really gets Picard as a character, and any of his scenes and conversations just leap off the page and come to life.
Currently starting: The Seven Per Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer
After hearing it mentioned on the WOK commentary for so long, it is time to finally try this story out.
Although I like "Carbon Creek," "Assignment: Earth," and other 20th-century Earth stories in Star Trek, From History's Shadow was just not my jam. I did not really connect to any of the Certoss or humans of the era, and the 23rd century scenes seemed a bit too frequent for their actual importance to the story. If you like UFO history or 50's-60's military undercover stories, then you may enjoy this one much more than I did.
The Crimson Shadow, on the other hand, is better than I remember it being. It is especially refreshing to see someone who truly cares about his people coming into power and the candidate who appeals to the worst impulses of the population missing out on power. Much has been said about how well McCormack writes about Garak, and this is very true. She also really gets Picard as a character, and any of his scenes and conversations just leap off the page and come to life.
Currently starting: The Seven Per Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer
After hearing it mentioned on the WOK commentary for so long, it is time to finally try this story out.
I remember liking the movie as a kid. And, honestly, I think some Ripper movies are less concerned with historical accuracy and more with the Ripper as an iconic boogeyman. You weren't supposed to "learn" anything about the real case; you were supposed to be entertained by the prospect of two quasi-mythic figures facing off in the foggy, gaslit streets of popular imagination. And once you drag Holmes and Watson into the mix, you've pretty much abandoned any pretense of historical accuracy.
See also THE LODGER, Trek's "Wolf in the Fold," Kolchak's "Ripper" episode, TIME AFTER TIME, etc. At this point, the Ripper is as much myth as history.
Confession: one of my very first professional sales was a Ripper story I sold to MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE back in the day. I mostly treated the Ripper as an iconic Victorian monster, like Mr. Hyde or Sweeney Todd, although I recall making an effort to get the geography of the East End right . . . .
Got paid a penny-and-half a word, as I recall!
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He may have always been a myth. I've seen a theory that the Ripper was basically an invention of the sensationalist press, conflating various unrelated murders and promoting the idea of a single serial killer to sell papers. Not sure how sound that is, but it's certainly plausible as something less reputable journalists would do.
DEAD ISLAND by Mark Morris
This is a novelisation of the sandbox survival horror zombie videogame. It’s a fun and fast-paced tie-in that speeds through a few highlight set-pieces from the game, thugh in a very curtailed fashion – and with a few differences. The aren’t the various different types of zombies that there are in the game, and none of the human soldiers either, but the characters have no problem with ammo, which is most unlike the game, which becomes rather frustrating when the player keeps respawning sans ammo amid a horde of zombies…
There’s a attempt to bring some life to the four main characters, and to include Jin – the girl who acts as a storage device during the game. Of the characters, only Sam B the rapper comes off that well, with Logan starting as a douche and staying that way no matter how often the reader told that he hasn’t. The rest are mere ciphers, which is pretty much what you’d expect from a game novelisation created from basic concepts where the player would be the person adding character to their choice of zombie-slaying avatar.
It’s nice to see how all the characters work together as a group in the book, since in the game you can only control one, which kmeans either play co-op or do everything yourself. Another difference from the actual game is the presence of child zombies – in the game, as in most sandbox games, there are no children to massacre, not even zombie ones. It’s the same in GTA, whose world is full of playparks and swing sets with no kids...
Despite the far easier – and more believably survivable – time the book characters have than the game’s player character, it did actually make me want to go back and get into the game again which I did do – finding myself having left off in the third act’s jungle section that doesn’t exist in the book – and that must be the purpose of a videogame novelisation. Though obviously I was biased by already having enjoyed the game. Anyway, a fun and timely pandemic-themed bit of entertainment.
This is a novelisation of the sandbox survival horror zombie videogame. It’s a fun and fast-paced tie-in that speeds through a few highlight set-pieces from the game, thugh in a very curtailed fashion – and with a few differences. The aren’t the various different types of zombies that there are in the game, and none of the human soldiers either, but the characters have no problem with ammo, which is most unlike the game, which becomes rather frustrating when the player keeps respawning sans ammo amid a horde of zombies…
There’s a attempt to bring some life to the four main characters, and to include Jin – the girl who acts as a storage device during the game. Of the characters, only Sam B the rapper comes off that well, with Logan starting as a douche and staying that way no matter how often the reader told that he hasn’t. The rest are mere ciphers, which is pretty much what you’d expect from a game novelisation created from basic concepts where the player would be the person adding character to their choice of zombie-slaying avatar.
It’s nice to see how all the characters work together as a group in the book, since in the game you can only control one, which kmeans either play co-op or do everything yourself. Another difference from the actual game is the presence of child zombies – in the game, as in most sandbox games, there are no children to massacre, not even zombie ones. It’s the same in GTA, whose world is full of playparks and swing sets with no kids...
Despite the far easier – and more believably survivable – time the book characters have than the game’s player character, it did actually make me want to go back and get into the game again which I did do – finding myself having left off in the third act’s jungle section that doesn’t exist in the book – and that must be the purpose of a videogame novelisation. Though obviously I was biased by already having enjoyed the game. Anyway, a fun and timely pandemic-themed bit of entertainment.
That's very plausible. In the summer and fall of 1888, the London press ascribed pretty much every Whitechapel murder or assault to the figure who eventually became known as the Ripper, and even the name "Jack the Ripper" was created by the press.
There's the Canonical Five that the Metropolitan Police and later scholars have focused on, and of them Liz Stride is the one with the most uncertainty as she was the one least mutilated in her death. The other four (Nichols, Chapman, Eddowes, and Kelly) all seem to be the work of a single person as there is a consistency to method, within the limits of late 19th-century forensic science, that could be determined post-mortem. But it's within those limits of late 19th-century forensic science that, yes, there is the possibility that the Canonical Five may really only be the Canonical Three or the Canonical Two victims of the same murderer and the others were simply other victims of murder in Whitechapel, like the dozen or so other women whose murders were ascribed to the Ripper in that autumn of terror.
Of the Ripper himself, I think the "David Cohen" theory is probably the correct one. Institutionalized after the Mary Kelly murder due to violent rages and syphilitic insanity, Cohen is the recorded name of a man whose real name is lost to history and is unlikely to ever be known, a nobody who appeared one day and effectively disappeared another and the murders are, unfortunately for the victims, the only mark he ever left on history.
Hmm, I'm skeptical. For one thing, blaming a poor Jewish immigrant for the murders is the sort of thing that has a good chance of being xenophobic scapegoating. For another, the article says the conclusion is based on psychological profiling, a technique whose success rate I gather is statistically little better than that of "psychics" or random guesswork, despite how it's portrayed in fiction.
Part of the reason I suspect there was no real Ripper is because of the proliferation of theories with no consensus. Any question has only one right answer but countless wrong answers. So if there's something real to be found, it follows that multiple independent investigators will eventually converge upon it. If the theories just proliferate in countless directions and never narrow in on anything, it suggests that none of them is more real than any of the others.
For any question, there is always at least one painstakingly researched, logically consistent, wrong answer.
At any rate, about to start Daniel (not about Daniel Striped Tiger, nor about his more animated grandson), with the apocryphal parts (Susanna, The Song of the Three Holy Children, and Bel and the Dragon) integrated in context.
To be followed by Hosea. Always a fun read: it's not every day you find the Almighty ordering a prophet to (as the late, slightly-addlebrained Rev'd Dr. Gene Scott paraphrased) "go marry a whore."
At any rate, about to start Daniel (not about Daniel Striped Tiger, nor about his more animated grandson), with the apocryphal parts (Susanna, The Song of the Three Holy Children, and Bel and the Dragon) integrated in context.
To be followed by Hosea. Always a fun read: it's not every day you find the Almighty ordering a prophet to (as the late, slightly-addlebrained Rev'd Dr. Gene Scott paraphrased) "go marry a whore."
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