I came to this novel by way of Gary Gygax by way of Appendix N of the 1st Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide by way of James Maliszewski at Grognardia.

I think it’s safe to say that, if not for that rather remarkable (and lengthy) chain of recommendations, I would probably have never read this slim volume — which, as far as I know, was published in 1963 and never seen again.

Sign of the Labrys is a post-apocalyptic tale of the sort commonly found in mid-20th century science fiction. What sets it apart is that it is also, although it doesn’t strictly look like it at first, science fantasy. (This becomes clear fairly quickly, but the exact reasons for its fantastical nature constitute a spoiler so drastic that I won’t even hint at it here.)

The ways in which Sign of the Labrys inspired Gygax’s dungeoncraft become both rapidly and intriguingly apparent: Sam Sewell, the protagonist of the tale, lives in a vast underground complex of modified caverns that was built as a refuge before the collapse of civilization. The apocalypse thinned out the population (killing nine in ten) and eradicated central authority, leaving behind vast catacombs of uninhabited space which small, spontaneous societies have repurposed in a variety of ways.

In short, Sign of the Labrys reads like a strange hybrid of Dungeons & Dragons and Metamorphosis Alpha. Here we find a clear predecessor of Castle Greyhawk: A multi-cultural, subterranean menagerie laid out in a pattern of levels and sub-levels connected by both the well-known thoroughfares and a plentitude of secret passages and hidden ladders.

This, by itself, would have made Sign of the Labrys a fascinating and worthwhile novel for a D&D afficionado like myself. But I also found the novel to be very entertaining in its own right. Addictive, in fact. It’s got a page-turning, pulpy pace mixed together with some nigh-poetic language and a strange, enigmatic mystery that leaves you yearning to know the answer.

Stylistically Sign of the Labrys reminds me quite favorably of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. It possesses the strange, otherworldly, and fantastical approach to matters of science fiction which characterizes the best of their work. Particularly Moore’s. Like Moore’s classic Jirel of Joiry stories, Sign of the Labrys reminds me of Alice in Wonderland smashed through the broken mirror of another genre’s conceits and set pieces. If I were to say that Sign of the Labrys periodically reads as if the author had taken a tab of LSD before sitting down at her typewriter it would not be wholly inaccurate. (It would, however, be rather less than charitable, as St. Clair’s writing is not merely a drug-induced rambling. In fact, it works consistently towards a larger stylistic and revelatory purpose.)

In the end, I found Sign of the Labrys to be delightfully entertaining. And since, like me, you are unlikely to encounter it by chance, I shall pass on the same recommendation that was given to me: From Gygax to AD&D to Grognardia to me to the Alexandrian and thus to you…

Find a copy if you can.

GRADE: B-

Margaret St. Clair
Published: 1963
Publisher: Bantam Books
Cover Price: $0.60
Buy Now!

Wow. That was really bad.

I just got back from watching X-Men Origins: Wolverine and I feel absolutely compelled to warn others from wasting their money on a cinematic travesty. What’s particularly remarkable about this disastrous failure is that the first half of the film is actually quite good. It’s not a cinematic triumph by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a solid, entertaining popcorn film.

But then, a little over halfway through the movie, a switch is flipped. Something incredibly stupid happens, and from that point forward the entire film becomes nearly unwatchable: The plot, the characters, and even the editing all become insultingly idiotic.

It’s as if the two halves of the film were made by completely different creative teams.

You probably won’t believe me. I’d certainly seen people giving the thumbs-down to this movie in various places around the ‘net before deciding to go and see it anyway. But consider this: I actually left the theater thinking X-Men 3 wasn’t a complete disaster. (It was a huge disappointment and completely wasted the opportunity created by the first two films. But it was passable.)

And I’m telling you that X-Men Origins: Wolverine is an unwatchable travesty.

From this point forward we’ll have SPOILERS so that I can rant a bit.

(1) First, allow me to reiterate that I thought the first half of the film was actually quite good for a popcorn action flick. The opening sequence with the young brothers; the montage sequence over the opening credits; and Hugh Jackman’s performance through the next section all made the film very entertaining.

(2) First Warning Sign: The scene where Logan is getting injected with the adamantine skeleton.

Stryker: “By the way, here are your dog-tags. Because even though you’re completely naked, laying in a tub of water, and about to be injected with molten metal, I think you should be wearing these.”

Logan: “I want new ones.”

Stryker: “What do you want them to say?”

Logan: “Wolverine.”

Stryker: “Really? Okay. Well, damn. Okay, everybody hold on. Logan, you just stay laying right there. Everybody else just hang out. I’m going to go have completely new dog-tags made.”

And they do…!

(3) Second Warning Sign: Agent Zero has just been killed trying to kill Wolverine.

Nameless Dude: “Agent Zero had no chance. You would need a gun with adamantine bullets. Like this one right here. That we have had all along. And could have easily given him.”

Stryker: “Wasn’t Agent Zero’s mutant power his ability to shoot guns really, really well?”

Nameless Dude: “Don’t forget his ability to leap around like a jackrabbit.”

Stryker: “Right. I see we’re theming these mutant powers well. But since he could shoot really well, wouldn’t it have made more sense to give him this gun?”

Nameless Dude: “… dude. You could have said something like an hour ago.”

(4) The Stupid of No Return: The first time Gambit attacked Wolverine, it made perfect sense. The second time Gambit attacked Wolverine? That was stupid. Really, really, really stupid.

(For those who haven’t seen the film: Gambit hates Sabretooth and wants him dead. He sees Wolverine with his blades to Sabretooth’s throat and hears him say, “I’m going to kill you.” So what does Gambit do? He attacks Wolverine and stops him from killing Sabretooth. Thirty seconds later after Sabretooth has escaped? Gambit is asking Wolverine to help him kill Sabretooth.)

(5) The Rest of the Stupid: I’d try to list it, but there’s really no point. After the Stupid of No Return, virtually every single second of the movie is stupid. So I’ll just highlight one particularly egregrious bit of stupid…

(6) Professor X is a Dick: Remember in the first X-Men movie when Professor X knows nothing about Wolverine? Turns out, he’s a dick. Not only is he telepathically monitoring the entire finale of the movie (and thus probably knows exactly who Wolverine is), but even if he somehow missed Wolverine’s presence telepathically it turns out his first twenty students (including Cyclops!) were all rescued by Wolverine himself!

The fact that the Cyclops himself doesn’t recognize Wolverine makes sense (because they’re actually quite careful about making sure he’s blind and never even hears Wolverine speak). But Professor X? He’s a dick.

Unless they get Bryan Singer back, this is probably the last X-Men movie they’ll be conning me into seeing for awhile.

With this novel, Brust seems to have lost the unique voice of Vlad Taltos. Instead of the clever wittiness of previous volumes, the Vlad of this book is merely sardonic and shrill. There’s also an oddly anachronistic tone in a patter drawn with distinctly 20th century rhthyms and tone.

This loss may have something to do with the fact that Brust is, once again, jumping back to a much earlier time in Vlad’s life. He handled this back-and-forth movement of the meta-narrative adroitly in the past, but the Vlad that we had last seen in Orca had been deeply transformed. Brust wouldn’t be the first author to demonstrate that, sometimes, you just can’t go home again.

The other failings of the book are less understandable, perhaps, but might ultimately have the same origin: If Brust was struggling to find young Vlad’s voice, that inauthentic note can very easily spread to other aspects of the work.

Notably there’s a narrative bloat coupled with a lack of focus. There’s lots of stuff on the page here that doesn’t seem to serve any real purpose and a lot of it is authorial meandering of the worst type. (“I’m going to talk about my inability to cook a particular type of bread because I’ve got a word count to hit by Friday and I don’t know what else to write just now.”)

Even the non-traditional narrative structure doesn’t work. It’s not actually being used to accomplish any specific effect (unlike the similar structure used in Taltos). So it just comes off as gimmicky and trite. In fact, the novel probably would have been better without this cheap trick. (In Taltos the same technique improved the novel because the structure reinforced the themes of the book and gave wider context to the individual events.)

In the case of Dragon, Brust tries to blatantly tell you that he’s giving you wider context. But, in actual practice, he just deflates the entire plot: The fact that you know what’s going to happen long before it happens just adds an even larger sense of bloat to the mild bloat which is already dragging the novel down.

It should also be noted that things generally improve as the novel continues, feeling almost as if Brust was warming up to his subject. In the end, however, I found this to be the weakest of the Taltos novels.

GRADE: C+

Steven Brust
Published: 1998
Publisher: Ace
Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0812589165
Buy Now!

Reading Orca is a somewhat surreal experience right now. Written in 1996, it nevertheless feels as if it should have a “RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES OF TODAY!” blurb blazoned across its cover.

In my reaction to Jhereg, I described the novel as: “A pulp detective novel by Raymond Chandler, except that the main character is an assassin instead of a private detective and his seedy office is in a world of high fantasy instead of the 1940s.”

Orca, on the other hand, is just a flat-out pulp detective novel. It feels like Chinatown played out across the financial headlines of today in a world of high fantasy.

And, much like Jhereg, that’s pretty much as cool as it sounds.

Orca also continues Athyra‘s approach of using non-Vlad points of view to tell the story. I have two thoughts on this:

First, Brust makes this approach work in Orca for reasons completely different than what made it work in Athyra. In Orca the technique is used to show us Vlad from the angle of one who knows him not at all.l In Athyra, Brust uses the technique to show us Vlad from the angle of one who knows him very well… and in the process reveals a lot about both Vlad and the narrator.

Second, there is a very deliberate effect being created in choosing to tell the story of this portion of Vlad’s life through the eyes of others. There is, in fact, a layering of narratives: The story is being told to a very specific character (Cawti) by another character (Kiera); and as she narrates to Cawti, Kiera also re-tells parts of the tale which were only told to her by Vlad.

So while some portions are, at first glance, still being narrated by Vlad in a traditional fashion, even that narrative is being filtered through a second point of view.

Unreliable narrators are often used for cheap effect. But there’s nothing cheap — or simple — about what Brust is accomplishing here.

GRADE: B+

Steven Brust
Published: 1996
Publisher: Ace
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0441001963
Buy Now!

“Wolves Beyond the Border” is one of the original Conan stories written by Robert E. Howard. The action, however, does not feature Conan himself. Howard chose to skew his literary camera off to one side and look at the world around his protagonist from a different angle.

This is my first memory of being exposed to this particular technique. It creates a very interesting effect, although — ultimately — I think the story is a failure. In the years since then, I’ve seen the technique used in a variety of series, and the result is more often failure than not.

Which is why, when I realized that Athyra was going to be using this particular approach, I subconsciously bunkered down for a long and painful slog…

… only to be more-than-pleasantly surprised to discover that my fears were unfounded.

In fact, it didn’t take me very long to realize that Vlad Taltos lends himself particularly well to this particular approach. Part of it can simply be boiled down to the fact that the Taltos stories have been told from the POV of Taltos himself. So this is literally our first opportunity to see what he looks like to other people. (Whereas with Conan, for example, the stories are told from a third-person POV, so there’s already some distance from the character.)

But Taltos’ susceptibility to this kind of technique also has a lot to do with the nature of the character himself: Taltos likes to play his cards close to his vest. He plots and he plans, but he usually keeps those plans — and even the information those plans are based on — a closely kept secret. When you’re inside his head, though, he can’t keep any secrets from you. It’s like watching a poker tournament on TV: You can see all the cards.

In Athyra, on the other hand, we suddenly find ourselves on the outside looking in: The cards are hidden from us. And that, in itself, is interesting.

But what really makes it fun is that, at this point, we’ve gotten to know Vlad pretty pretty well. So we still have a pretty deep insight into the types of games he plays and the way he plays them. So, on the one hand, we can suddenly sympathize with the new protagonist who finds himself baffled by Vlad’s hidden strategies (a POV that suddenly gives us a fresh insight into the perspective of many supporting characters from the previous books), but on the other hand we can also appreciate the deeper structure of what Vlad is doing.

I think the other thing that makes Athyra work is the type of story Brust has chosen to tell: The main character is Savn, a young Dragaeran lad on the cusp of reaching adulthood. The novel, in short, falls into the familiar genre of “young boy/girl finds unique bond with exotic mentor while coming of age”. (My personal favorite in this category is probably Stephen King’s Hearts in Atlantis, although you’ll find examples of the genre cropping up everywhere.)

This type of story weds itself well to the enjoyment gleaned from knowing Vlad better than the main character does. In fact, the entire genre is largely driven by the fact that we — either as adults or as the genre-aware — can appreciate the “exotic mysteries” of the mentor figure. Part of the genre’s effectiveness is that it saddles both sides of the chasm which is “coming of age”. On the one hand, we remember the (relative) innocence of our youth. On the other, we know the wider world which is being revealed. In the interstice between the two, we remember what that coming of age was like… and thus become intimately sympathetic with the main character as they follow the same journey.

(When I was a kid, on the other hand, these stories operated on a very different level: The fictional mentor became my mentor as well, and I became intimately sympathetic with the main character because their journey was my journey.)

The other thing about this type of story is that, although it is not told from his POV, the mentor is a main character. When done properly, the story is as much the mentor’s as the student’s. So even though we’re pushed out of Vlad’s head, Vlad in some sense remains a main character (which I think helps make the technique work).

COMING OF IMMORTAL AGE

In my reaction to Yendi I discussed the genre-alteration of familiar tropes. Brust has a talent for taking existing archetypes, running them through the unique characteristics of his fantasy world, and creating something refreshingly unique and entertaining.

In the case of Athyra, Brust is telling a coming of age story for Savn… but Savn is 80+ years old.

Savn is a near-immortal Dragaeran with a lifespan of several hundred (possibly thousand) years. He is also a farmboy still serving in his apprenticeship to a physick. So in terms of social position (and even maturity), Savn is basically a teenager. A very old teenager.

Brust appears to be consciously attempting to explore what it would mean to be a near-immortal living in a society of other near-immortals. It’s a bold challenge. And, in the narrow case of Savn and the story of Athyra, Brust succeeds.

But, to a large extent, he only succeeds by “cheating” — and so, in a broader sense, he also fails.

By “cheating”, I mean that he has placed Savn in a rural community which is socially backwards and largely populated with ignorance. This allows Brust to get away with having Savn be relatively naive and culturally under-developed. In other words, it allows him to largely draw a line of equivalence between “human 16-year old” and “Dragaeran 80-year old”.

Which, as I say, works just fine for the story… but still disappoints on some level because it misses out on what could have been a much bolder and more dynamic challenge.

Let’s try to break this down. If you actually took human lifespans and started lengthening them, what would happen to the concepts of “childhood” and “adulthood”?

Well, to some extent we don’t have to imagine it: It’s been happening all around us for the past hundred years or so. The concept of “teenager”, for example, is a recent one. (The term itself wasn’t even coined until the 20th century.) It represents a rather radical departure from ages past, when people we now consider “kids” would have actually been seen as fully functional adults. And over the past decade or so, I have noted increasing trends to infantilize college students, with a growing expectation that colleges and universities should be acting as some sort of surrogate parents for their students.

And this social trend appears to be expanding even as recent physical trend lines indicate that the onset of puberty is happening at earlier ages.

Speaking in general terms, I see three reasons for this expansion of pre-adulthood:

First, the increase in average lifespan lessens the sense of urgency in reaching adulthood and pursuing adult goals.

Second, the amount of “basic knowledge” expected for someone to function as an adult in society has drastically increased. We’ve gone from the completion of high school being exceptionally rare to a college education being seen as a fairly standard expectation. The acquisition of more knowledge requires more time, and this naturally expands the amount of time it takes to become an adult in the eyes of society.

Third, the amount of leisure time and the economic structure of our society has fundamentally shifted. When it’s an economic necessity for your kids to help you in the field, you’ll get them out there as soon as they’re physically capable of helping you. But the vast majority of modern careers don’t have that kind of structure. This, again, reduces the sense of urgency in reaching the transition from childhood to adulthood.

But there’s an important proviso here: The 16-year old of today is not the functional equivalent of the 10-year old of yesteryear. And this is the mistake that Brust makes when he draws the line of equivalence between a modern 16-year old and a Dragaeran 80-year old. The expansion of childhood isn’t like taking the same chunk of butter and spreading it over a larger slice of bread.

Because, fundamentally, the 80-year old Dragaeran will still have 80 years of experience, even if they’re not functionally an adult in the eyes of their society. And you can kinda duck around that, as Brust does, by putting the character into a situation where they can easily hit a ceiling of knowledge and enter an endless cycle of dreary life.

But I think you’re ducking out of the really interesting question: Whether it’s a matter of physical maturation or social construct (or both), what does it really mean to be 80 years old and still be a child?

Athyra doesn’t try to answer that question. If it did, it might have been a great novel. As it is, it’s merely a fun one.

GRADE: B

Steven Brust
Published: 1993
Publisher: Ace
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0441033423
Buy Now!