Hey, folks. Welcome back to the Book Report!

Last month, Disney released Tangled, a new take on the Germanic fairy-tale Rapunzel, collected by the Brothers Grimm. It had an official budget of $260 million, making it officially the second most expensive film ever made. Silly Disney.

But I like the fairy-tale with a twist idea. Quite a few books have been written with the idea in mind, and I thought for today’s Book Report I’d take a look at a few of them.

Probably the king of twisting fairy-tales around is Gregory Maguire. In 1995 he turned a classic villain into a sympathetic heroine in Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West. The excellent book was adult-oriented and very dark, and the butchering that happened to it on Broadway hardly does it justice, no matter how much you believe the musical was excellent. He returned to his version of Oz in 2005 with Son of a Witch and again in 2008 with A Lion Among Men, but before that he twisted the Cinderella fairy-tale around in 1999 with Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (which Disney converted into a TV movie in 2002). In 2003, Maguire twisted another fairy-tale with Mirror, Mirror, presenting a new look at Snow White.

In 1983, Anne Rice (writing under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure) published The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, an erotic Bondage/Dominant/Submissive/Masochist retelling of the fairy-tale. She made the story a trilogy with Beauty’s Punishment in 1984 and Beauty’s Release in 1985. The highly graphic erotica series out-sold her previous best-seller, Interview With the Vampire.

One of my favorite revisions of a fairy-tale is the 1999 novel Enchantment, written by Orson Scott Card. More than just an alternate retelling of Sleeping Beauty, it sets the fairy-tale smack-dab in the middle of Russian folk-tales, mixes it up with a little Jewish home life, and throws in some Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for good measure. Then he inverts it all and adds the slightest dash of Narnia.
The recipe concocts a delicious yarn, where the villains revel in their villainy and heroes realize just how bloody difficult it is to actually be heroic.

I’ve written about Orson Scott Card before (twice, actually), and it’s a testament to his talent that each time it’s been about a different genre of fiction. I’m not sure I’ve ever agreed with his personal politics or religion, but he manages to tap into something universal in his fiction that resonates strongly with me, and he’s been the most recommended author I’ve given people (seriously, go read Ender’s Game).

Grimm’s Fairy Tales are currently available for free as an ebook at Barnes and Noble right now. If you are so inclined, I encourage you to go give ‘em a read (or reread) and then check out some of these revisions. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Hey kids, welcome back to The You-Know-What! Just two more days until the first Mythoi trade hits the general consumer market, so go pre-order immediately.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Quantum Theory and ways fiction writers use it for stories, and one of those ways was time travel. This got me thinking about the number of different time-travel novels I’ve enjoyed, and so I thought I’d take The Book Report on its own journey through time, examining time travel literature.

The Long Sleep
Perhaps the earliest time-travel story occurs in the 4th century Hindu script of the Mahabharatha, concerning King Revaita. He travels to Brahma to ask who among the candidates would be a worthy suitor for his daughter, to which Brahma replies that time runs differently on each plain of existence and while the King was making his request many ages have passed on earth.
Early time-travel stories have much in common with this story, where the main character falls asleep (such as in Washington Irving’s 1819 story Rip Van Winkle) or visits a magical realm and when they awake or return they find that many years have passed. One early example is Urashima Tarō, an 8th century Japanese legend about a fisherman who rescues a turtle and as a reward is allowed to visit the Palace of the Dragon God under the sea. When he returns to his village three days later, he finds that three centuries have passed.
What nearly all of these early time-travel stories have in common is the idea that time can move faster, allowing the character to view or visit (or be stranded) in the future. One of the first examples of a time traveler going backwards in time is Mark Twain’s 1895 satire A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. But even then, the main character goes through time by a blow to the head.

Rise of the Machines
The first example of a character using a machine to travel through time is in a story by H.G. Wells, but it wasn’t in his 1895 novel The Time Machine. Seven years earlier, he wrote a serialized story called The Chronic Argonauts. The characters mention the different years they traveled to, but they don’t offer any detailed accounts of what happened on their adventures. Wells’ popular novel The Time Machine holds that distinction. The concept of a time machine remains popular to this day.

A Couple of Places to Tie A Boat
The main issue most time travel stories have to get around is the paradox. It is called the Grandfather Paradox, first proposed by science fiction writer René Barjavel in his 1943 book The Imprudent Traveller. Here’s how it works: “if one goes backwards in time and kills one of their ancestors before he had children, the traveller cannot exist and therefore cannot kill the ancestor.”

Time Travel novels come up with several different ways to avoid the Grandfather Paradox. One way is through the many-universe theory of quantum mechanics, which I briefly described when I examined Crichton’s Timeline.
Another way to deal with the Grandfather Paradox is through a Destruction Resolution. One of the most well known cases would be in the movie Back To The Future, where (Spoiler) Marty McFly starts to disappear because his mother fell in love with him instead of his father. Most stories that deal with a Destruction Resolution work to prevent it. In Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, Orson Scott Card writes of a situation where a Destruction Resolution might be embraced. I generally enjoy most things Card writes, and this novel is no exception. It’s a great examination of the mistakes humans made in discovering the Americas, and a lovely fantasy of how to prevent it.
A final way to deal with the Grandfather Paradox is by strict adherence to the Novikov Principle, employed to great effect in The Time Traveler’s Wife, published in 2003 by Audrey Niffenegger. The Novikov self-consistency principle was developed in the mid-1980’s by Russian scientist Igor Novikov, and asserts that if an event exists that would give rise to a paradox, or to change the past in any way, then the probability of that even occurring is zero. What this means is that our history is a fixed timeline. Everything that happened did so either because the time-traveler failed or was never there. You can’t go back and stop the Titanic from sinking because it already sank. Science fiction author John Varley proposed an acceptable way to deal with that problem in his 1983 novel Millennium (which became the 1989 film of the same name), where passengers of a plane that was doomed to crash were saved by bringing them to the future and replacing them with copied duplicates to be found in the crash debris. Since there was no deviation from the fixed timeline, ie. a plane crashed and there were no survivors, there was no paradox.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey through Thyme. Give the books I mentioned a read, they are all great fun.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Hi, kids! For today’s Book Report I’m reviewing a novel that spawned a series popular worldwide. It’s the story of a group of special kids, and one in particular, who band together to save the world.
For those who felt their chest seize up because they thought I was going to review Harry Potter, you can relax. For the record: I promise never to review Harry Potter on The Book Report.

The book I’m talking about is Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card.

First published as a novelette in 1977, and then released as a full-length novel in 1985, the popular novel won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award, spawned two series, several supplemental short stories, there is a movie in the works, and Marvel is working on comic adaptations. The novel has been translated into 27 languages and is part of the leadership curriculum at West Point.

Ender’s Game has probably one of my favorite openers to a science fiction novel (though most favorite would be the first line in Gibson’s Neuromancer: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”):

“I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one. Or at least as close as we’re going to get.“
“That’s what you said about the brother.“
“The brother tested out impossible. For other reasons. Nothing to do with his ability.“
“Same with the sister. And there are doubts about him. He’s too malleable. Too willing to submerge himself in someone else’s will.“
“Not if the other person is his enemy.“
“So what do we do? Surround him with enemies all the time?“
“If we have to.“
“I thought you said you liked this kid.“
“If the buggers get him, they’ll make me look like his favorite uncle.“
“All right. We’re saving the world, after all. Take him.”

The are so many reasons why I like this opening. Firstly, it takes a risk by beginning the book-and the first page-with only dialogue and no discription, no clue as to who is talking, but it sets up a series of questions that intrigue me enough to keep reading.
Who is talking? How can someone see through someone else’s eyes and hear through someone else’s ears? Who are they talking about? Why is he the one? What happened to the brother and sister? Who are the buggers? What are their intentions, saving the world by surrounding a kid with enemies? “Take him” where? For what?

As these questions get answered more arise as Ender, the kid in question, is taken to a Battle School where he government trains military geniuses through various games. To save the world.

What follows is a novel of incredible depth and an incredibly complex and interesting main character cought up in the literal games of the Battle School and the somewhat more obscure political games of the military, his fellow students, and the government.
In the end, the book is an interesting examination of what exactly it means to be human. The two ensuing series which came from the novel also explore what it means to be human, each novel attacking the issue from a different perspective.

My big criticism with the novel is Card’s unwillingness to let the novel be what it is. When it was first published in 1985, the Cold War was reaching its peak, and the politics of the novel take it further, not anticipating its collapse. The aliens are called “buggers”, reflecting mankind’s xenophobia and habit of attaching durogatory terms to species or races they do not understand and/or fear. In 1991 Card released a new version, updating some of the politics and changing some of the language. Card recently announced his plan to revisit the novel again, updating the political atmosphere to more accurately reflect the changes the world has undergone since its original inception.
The most valuable aspect of history is the opportunity to learn from it, and science fiction excels in commentating on the state of the world in a way unique to its genre (for example, check out Mythoi). I understand the idea that an artist’s work is never finished, but I can’t get behind Mr. Card’s decision to continually edit his most popular novel to more accurately reflect the present.

I’d rather he write a new novel. Let Ender’s Game become the classic it deserves to be.

Until next time,
Still paddlin the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_