Marvano’s The Forever War — Friday’s Funnies

page from the Marvano adaptation of the Forever War

The first time I read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, it was in comics form, as a three part adaptation by Belgian writer/artist Marvano. The Forever War was Haldeman’s science fictional treatment of what he went through in the Vietnam War and was originally published in 1974; Marvano’s adaptation came out in 1988, a decade and a half later, yet it fitted the eighties like a glove. As he said in his foreword, what with the Falklands War, Grenada, Reagan talking about winning a nuclear war, a wave of right and leftwing terrorism paralysing Belgium and so on, it still seemed relevant. It seems so today too.

Which is largely due to Marvano’s own efforts, rather than Haldeman’s. Marvano had only three albums of 48 pages each to adapt a 230 page novel and like film, comics adaptations of novels need more room, rather than less. So he had to cut and choose what to keep in and what to adapt. In doing so he created the “good parts” version of Haldeman’s novel. He sharped it up, cut out the more awkward bits and kept the focus tight.

Haldeman’s original novel had two main themes. The first was the absurdity of war in general, as his hero, William Mandella, a reluctant recruit into the UN Expeditionary Force against the Taurans, the first alien race Earth had encountered and immediately went to war with, through the miracle of time dilation manages to be the only man to survive the entire war, from its start in 2010 to its end more than a millennium later, in 3177. In between the three campaigns Mandella fights in Haldeman explores his second theme, that of a soldier’s alienation on his return from fighting an unpopular war to his homeland when he realises it has changed while he remained in stasis. A popular because it was true cliche about the Vietnam War, Haldeman exagerrated these effects by his use of time dilation, having Mandella experience only a few years of war, then coming back to Earth to find decades have past and the world irrevocably changed.

Marvano could not do justice to both these themes in his adaptation and concentrated on the first. He kept the plot lines relating to the second theme as well, but compressed them greatly, spending much less time detailing the ways in which Earth changes during Mandella’s war. In Mandella’s first return to Earth for example, Marvano emphasises the way the UN bureaucracy censored his television interview over his adventures adapting to his new world, where a third of the population is now homosexual. Which is a good thing, as these are the parts of the novel that had dated the most: by making them less explicit, more generalised they keep their relevance. It’s enough to know things have changed enormously without needing to go into detail.

A similar pairing down is done all through the comics series and it works. What Marvano does very well, extremely well in fact for what was his first major comics project, was to let the artwork and narration speak for themselves, each conveying part of the story He lets Mandella tell the reader anything that can’t be put in pictures and let the art carry the action, not needing text to tell you what you can see in the art yourself. Mandella’s narration is almost constant, but Marvano is not afraid to silence him when needed. He’s a good artist, with a good eye for both creating realistic looking future technology and weapons, as well as for creating subtle and not so subtle facial expressions. It’s an eighties future, but still holds up today I think.

Sadly, the Forever War comic is long out of print in English, though can still be had in French or Dutch. It’s my candidate for best sf adaptation in comics ever. Marvano would do more adaptations of Haldeman novels, including The Long Habit of Living for his series Dallas Barr.

Why is Connie Willis so popular?

I only wish I could write reviews as good as Jonathan McCalmont’s review of the Connie Willis novels Blackout and All Clear:

Clearly based upon extensive and painstaking research, Blackout and All Clear are filled with shops and underground stations that are bombed on particular days, of full moons rising, tides going out, and changes in military procedure occurring in response to precise historical events. It is a novel in which shop-girls read film star magazines, and vicars blush whenever anyone mentions sex, because that’s what shop-girls and vicars genuinely did. These are books obsessed with mundane details and yet, despite an almost religious desire to communicate the facts of 1940s’ British life, the novel’s lack of well-rounded characters and blindness to issues such as class mean that the books amount to little more than images of a dead culture. A culture pickled in the vinegar of the mundane and prominently displayed in a museum filled with well-preserved and carefully labelled dead things. This is partly a reflection of the stereotypical nature of Willis’ secondary characters but it is also due to the fact that her protagonists are eternal outsiders who live in perpetual fear of changing the past. This fear not only distances us from the lives of people in the 1940s, it also encourages a sense of awed submission before history that strikes me as profoundly unhealthy.

[…]

Given that I did not hate everything about this novel, why did I give it the lowest possible mark? The answer is because Willis and her publisher are taking the piss. Cast your eyes to the top of this page and you will see not one but two listed prices for this book. The reason for this is that, despite having been written as a single novel, Blackout and All Clear were issued as two separate books months apart. Spectra did this despite the narrative not stopping at a natural break-point and despite the fact that, combined, the two books are not as long as some of the individual volumes of George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Fire And Ice.

This is nothing short of the deliberate exploitation of Willis’ fan-base, and Willis is quite obviously complicit in this wretched behaviour. Willis signed off on the deal, Willis accepts the royalty cheques for two books and Willis is the person who turned in a novel so padded with research and bloated with narrative speed-bumps that is at least three times as long as it should have been. That is taking the piss and that is why I have knocked one mark off my score. Genre writing already has a regrettable tendency towards bloat; I see no reason why we should be giving publishers and authors an economic incentive to let the situation get any worse.

On his own blog, Jonathan also goes into the lack of basic research shown in these novels:

P.S. – In my review, I credit Willis with having conducted “extensive and painstaking research”. What this remark referred to was her attention to such historical details as when places were bombed and when certain events took place in the war. However, as someone who has lived his entire life in London, I spent most of my time with the novels scaling the walls of an uncanny valley, painfully aware of the ways in which Willis’s London failed to mesh with my experience of the town.

That “extensive and painstaking research” turns out not to be, as shown here and here.

All of which raises the question of why Connie Willis is so highly rated in America and why Blackout/All Clear ended up on the Locus Recommended Reading list. The flaws pointed out by Jonathan have always been present in her work. Her plots tend to be of the idiot kind and at least for the stories set in the UK, the research seems to have been done by reading a few Wodehouse stories. It’s all a bit sloppy, yet she’s incredible popular with the Hugo Voters, having won it for her novels Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing about the Dog, as well as a whole slew of short stories. So what’s going on?

Leaving aside the idea that the Hugo voters just have awful tastes and only vote for familiar names, Willis must be doing something right, that despite the sloppy research and at times lazy writing and idiot plotting, people like her work enough to vote for it. As Dan Brown’s career has shown, sloppy research has never bothered enough people to be a hindrance to a writer: most of us only notice it when the mistakes are about something we know well and fewer people care about such mistakes even when they are pointed out. Willis certainly isn’t the only sf writer to get her facts terribly, terribly wrong: ask James Nicoll about the Pyms drinking Canadian in Oath of Fealty or Stephen Baxter’s Titan. What’s more important is that Willis gives the appearance of doing her research well, dropping little nuggets for the reader to pick up on and feel clever for having spotted the allusion. In To Say Nothing about the Dog for example she all but nudges you in the ribs to let you spot all the Jerome K. Jerome references.

That’s a trick a lot of the more successful, one step up from Dan Brown or James Patterson bestseller writers have: making the reader feel more intelligent than they actually are. Willis does this by presenting an England in her novels and stories that is familiar to the reader through film and television series an from reading writers like Wodehouse or Sayers, then gives this just enough verisimilitude to make readers not familiar with the real Oxford feel she’s done her homework, as well as a bit clever for recognising this.

Her writing meanwhile, on a sentences and paragraphs level, is certainly not bad and accessible enough for most readers; sometimes a bit bland, but she can be witty and amusing as well. She does good story, which is always an advantage for a group as relatively conservative as the Hugo voters. Connie Willis is a middle of the road writer who few people are rabid fans off, but much more importantly, few people loathe either. In a pinch she’ll do. (In that context it would be interesting to see how many people voted her in first place for each of her Hugo wins, or that she won on the strenght of having more second and lower place prefered votes.)

The American Stephen Baxter in other words.

Among Others – Jo Walton

cover of Among Others


Among Others
Jo Walton
302 pages
published in 2010

Have you ever read a book you just wanted to gulp down in one sitting, so eager to get on with the story that everything else has to wait? Or alternatively, have you ever read a book you didn’t want to end, stretching out your reading so you could savour it, making excuses not to read it just now, so as not end it too soon? I’m sure you have and so have I, but much rarer are those books where you want to do both, gulp down the story and stretch it out because once the book is finished you can never read it for the first time again. That’s how Among Others was for me, a book I wanted to stay in, but also wanted to keep turning the page to see how it would all turn out. Jo Walton has always been a good writer, but here she’s surpassed herself.

But perhaps I’m not quite objective. After all, I’ve known and liked Jo since the mid-nineties, as a fellow fan and friend from the rec.arts.sf.* Usenet groups, who has had a huge influence on my reading, in science fiction, in fantasy, who I got to know about as well as you can get to know a person from Usenet posts. All I could think about at the start of the book was how Jo-shaped it was, even knowning going in that this was rooted in her actual life growing up as a science fiction reading Welsh girl in a post-industrial landscape which she populated with fairies. She made the fairies and the magic real for Among Others but at heart it’s still her own story and that’s what made me want to spent more time in it, because being with Jo, a disguised Jo in fiction is the next best thing to seeing her at a convention.

Which is all good and well, but what will that do for you, if you don’t know Jo Walton and are just wondering if all the praise from people like Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Cory Doctorow, Robin Hobb, Steven Brust, Suzy McKee Charnas and many others is justified? Will you get anything out of this?

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More on The Left Hand of Darkness

I’ve kept thinking about The Left Hand of Darkness since I’ve finished reading it yesterday, especially about the gender aspects. What I didn’t express well enough in my review was how little the idea of a naturally sexless people actually mattered for the story. The core of the story is the relationship between Genly Ai and Estraven and while the latter is supposed to be sexless, it could just as well have been a story about two men bonding together in the face of common danger. As I said yesterday as well, using gendered male pronouns for the Gethenians was a mistake as it reinforces the idea that the characters we meet are all male, if occasionally effeminate. It wouldn’t take that much rewriting to make the gender aspects disappear altogether.

What I kept comparing The Left Hand of Darkness is Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite, which takes place on a planet where through some handwave only female creatures are able to live. Both are at heart planetary romances, stories whose main purpose is to lead the protagonist (usually, as here, an outsider) on an exotic tour of the planet in question, the better to showcase the cultures and landscapes it contains. The planetary romance is a science fiction subgenre of long standing, a logical translation of the exploration or adventure stories set in Darkest Africa and the jungles of South America, only set on Mars or Venus. What Griffith does in Ammonite is telling this very familiar sort of story, but with women in every role you’d normally find male characters and she does so without fuss. Its very matter of factness helps underscore how often the opposite is the case, how many stories there are with only male roles, or with just the occasional token female love interest or professional victim.

Coming back to Darkness, I feel that LeGuin failed where Griffith succeeded. Griffith had women in roles that in formula fiction are automatically filled by male characters and did so matter of factly. LeGuin has supposedly sexless characters doing the same, has the narration (Genly) discuss this sexlessness a lot, but shows characters that still read male, behaving little different from how they would in a standard adventure story. There are no female-presenting characters doing the stuff male characters do normally.

A related problem I have with the gender relations in Darkness, the more I think of it, has to do with the infodumps LeGuin gives about how the whole sexual cycle of the Genthenians works. It’s a common pattern in nature of course, an animal that’s without sex drive for most of the year, only getting in heat at certain times, the twist she added being the idea of being able to “chose” becoming male or female gendered. The problem I had with it was that, despite LeGuin’s comparisons between the unity of the Genthenian gender and the “bisexuality” of the rest of humanity, it was actually still too binairy for me. In kemmer people become either male or female, pairing of with either a female or a male partner, but male-male, or female-female partnerships aren’t mentioned, if I remember correctly: no homosexuality. Kemmer and kemmering are presented as deterministic a process as the rutting rituals of lower animals. Real humans (or even some known animal species) don’t work that way, why would the Gentenians?

I won’t say too much about the idea that rape in such a system is impossible, as LeGuin says somewhere, because that’s so selfevidently silly that it’s not worth going in to.

I do want to say that this criticism does not make The Left Hand of Darkness a bad book, rather than a good novel with flaws. Just the fact that I can engage it on this level is a good thing; too many novels just skid along the surface of your engagement leaving only quickly fading ripples.

The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. LeGuin

Cover of The Left Hand of Darkness


The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. LeGuin
286 pages
published in 1969

Last year I discovered I read why too few science fiction books written by women and started making up for this lack by (re)reading some favourite writers. With the new year and following the example of several fellow science fiction bloggers, I decided to approach this more systemically, by pledging to read at least one science fiction or fantasy book by a female writer each month. The Left Hand of Darkness is the first and I choose it because it was a well respected classic novel, winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, I had never managed finish before, despite having tried three or four times and as important, it was short.

Since The Left Hand of Darkness is such a well known work, over forty years old and discussed and summarised extensively during that time, you can’t help but come to it with certain preconceptions about it. The most important of which you’ll have to let go if you want to get the shape of the true book. This is not a feminist science fiction novel. It’s a novel about gender and gender expectations and the role our assumptions of having two separate sexes each with their own character, strength and weakness play in our societies, but it’s not feminist, unless every book about gender is by definition feminist. What you actually get in this story is a fairly traditional view of gender, as I’ll try to show.

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