With the news of the movie and the fantastic casting news surrounding it, I've found myself obsessing a little over the series (I finally read The Wind Through the Keyhole and started to catch up on the Marvel comic series that tells the story of Roland's early days, filling in gaps between the flashbacks we got in The Gunslinger and Wizard and Glass.)
This obsession has also seen me looking into the details surrounding the film, and there's a bit of cause for concern.
Admittedly, adapting this series outside of a Game of Thrones-style HBO series (and even then it'd be tricky, what with Eddie and Susannah not coming in until book two) is going to mean some stuff is will need to be streamlined.
But supposedly shooting is going to be only seven weeks - which seems low for such a sprawling epic. There are also interviews that suggest that most of the movie will be taking place in our world (well, presumably the "not-quite-our-world" where Co-Op City is in Brooklyn, but close enough.) Now, tons of the Dark Tower takes place in New York and New England, but I do think that we'll need to see some of Mid-World to get a sense of the epic scope of the series.
I will be watching the situation carefully.
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Game of Thrones Returns with a Follow-Up to Season 5
Game of Thrones is officially off the rails. While there's still some existing material in the story of the Iron Islands from the books, most of the major plot lines (and let's be honest, the Iron Islands don't yet seem too major) were caught up at the end of last season. So the show is now in the position of revealing new stories - we don't know how much of this is from George R R Martin's talks with the show runners and how much of it is just the writers coming up with new stuff, but no one (other than the show's cast and crew, who obviously shot all this stuff already) now has an advanced knowledge of the plot.
Season 6, Episode 1 starts off the season a bit slow - basically, we get a bunch of immediate aftermath stuff.
The Wall:
We begin with the bled-out body of Jon Snow. Yes, he's dead, of course, but notably they haven't yet burned his body. Davos finds the body and takes it with Dolorous Edd and some of the other loyal Nights Watch brothers. Thorne addresses the men, confessing to his treason, but arguing that he's saved the Watch. He has the support of the other officers (no head Maester, given that Aemon is dead and Sam is only just on his way to Old Town.) There's certainly plenty of loyalists to Jon Snow, but there's no one except for the small group barricaded inside a small room with Jon's body (and Snow) being led by default by Davos around which a counter-mutiny could spring forth. Edd's out, and honestly I forgot what his plan was, but it might involve talking to Melisandre.
Speaking of old Mel, and I mean Old. She's clearly pretty down after both Stannis' death and Jon's. We also find out that that choker she wears makes her look about fifty years younger than she actually is. So, naked old lady (though I think that was Carice Van Houten in make-up.) My words when this was revealed: "Of course she's ancient!"
King's Landing:
Cerise is all excited for Myrcella to come back when a Dornish ship sails into port. But when she sees Jaime and a shroud-covered body on the boat coming in, she realizes what has happened. The breaking of Cersei continues.
Meanwhile, Margaery is still in jail. Not too much development there.
Dorne:
Ok, here some stuff happens. First off, Doran gets a raven telling him about Myrcella's death (damn combination of auto-correct and Martin's just-slightly-different naming conventions,) and just as he does, Elaria Sand stabs him in the heart while one of the Sand Snakes back-stabs Areo Hotah (man, I doubt those who haven't read the books would even know that he has a name.) On the ship back from King's Landing, Trystane is mourning his would-be wife. But not for long, because the two accompanying Sand Snakes come to kill him, and he gets a spear through the back of the head and out the front in this week's most gruesome death.
So the coup in Dorne is in full swing. Too bad Doran didn't get to really do anything.
Winterfell (and Environs:)
Sansa and Theon (I think we can start calling him that again) run from Ramsay's dogs while Ramsay has a moment where he seems almost human, mourning for... that equally sadistic chick who isn't in the books and whose name I can't... Miranda! Mourning Miranda. But then he tells the Maester to feed her to the dogs instead of giving her a proper burial, so, you know, Ramsay's gotta Ramsay.
Anyway, Theon and Sansa flee the Bolton hounds and hound masters, but they're caught despite a desperate icy-river ford. It looks like things are screwed when... Brienne and Podrick come to the rescue! And yes, I did make a "Podrick Brings the Payne" joke when he stuck a sword through one of the Bolton men. Theon even gets a kill, saving Podrick when he's knocked down. Sansa (wisely) accepts Brienne's service this time, and Theon seems to have earned her trust a bit.
Mereen (and Environs:)
The leftover Daenerys party talk over strategy. Mereen's in trouble, between the Sons of the Harpy and slaves who feel she abandoned them (which... yeah kind of.) And there are Red Priests showing up to preach to those people (basically saying Dany was the catalyst, now they have to take the power of flame into their own hands.) Oh, and someone has burned all the ships in the harbor, so it might take a little longer to launch the invasion of Westeros.
Tyrion is left behind with Grey Worm, Missandei, and Varys (the others don't know he's there, I think,) while Daario and Jorah (whose Greyscale infection is spreading along his arm) try to track her, finding the ring she dropped at the end of last season.
Dany is captured by the Dothraki and brought before Khal Maro. Once she reveals she's Drogo's widow, they stop all their talk of murder and rape, but while that's, you know, a step in the right direction, they do insist she go back to Vaes Dothrak to join the Dosh Khaleen - the widows of Khals who serves as a kind of ruling council for the Dothraki but also aren't allowed to leave.
Braavos:
Arya is on the streets as a blind beggar, but it seems this is only part of her training. The Waif (no longer wearing the Jaqen H'gar face - and just to be clear, the Kindly Man at the House of Black and White probably never was Jaqen H'gar. In fact, Jaqen H'gar was probably never Jaqen H'gar. But I wonder if this means that Tom Wiaschiha isn't going to be on the show...? Or maybe he'll be in Sam's story down in Old Town (oh yeah, there's a plot that the show hasn't done. Though it's barely done anything with that in the books either.) Anyway, Arya's still going to get some training, but it'll be extra hard because she's blind.
So as a premiere, this honestly isn't the most mind-blowing. The Melisandre reveal was pretty good, one of those twists you feel stupid for not figuring out beforehand (though what impact it will have is probably minimal.) They're really pushing for Dorne to be a thing, which... well, if you have to, I guess. With the Tyrells unlikely the help thanks to the whole church imprisonment thing, war with the Boltons now on the table (given the brief marriage to the smuggled-out-of-King's-Landing Sansa,) a coming war with Dorne could be really devastating for the Lannisters, and I don't think Cersei is going to even be in power by the time Daenerys gets to Westerns.
I'm hoping next week we get some of the trippy tree-druid stuff with Brann, as we've been waiting since season 4 for that stuff. I think Melisandre reviving Jon is still very much on the table.
It's great that Sansa/Theon and Brienne/Podrick have linked up, but I really don't know where they'll go. Castle Black is not safe territory for them, though they have no reason to know that yet. However, the next-on segment suggests the Boltons might march against Castle Black, which... could actually have some positive effects, as we'd have Bolton vs Thorne, possibly giving Davos (and even Jon, if he does get revived) time to escape.
Oh, was Edd going to get the Wildlings? That might have been it.
Anyway, Clusterfuck is Coming up in the North. Looking forward to next week!
Season 6, Episode 1 starts off the season a bit slow - basically, we get a bunch of immediate aftermath stuff.
The Wall:
We begin with the bled-out body of Jon Snow. Yes, he's dead, of course, but notably they haven't yet burned his body. Davos finds the body and takes it with Dolorous Edd and some of the other loyal Nights Watch brothers. Thorne addresses the men, confessing to his treason, but arguing that he's saved the Watch. He has the support of the other officers (no head Maester, given that Aemon is dead and Sam is only just on his way to Old Town.) There's certainly plenty of loyalists to Jon Snow, but there's no one except for the small group barricaded inside a small room with Jon's body (and Snow) being led by default by Davos around which a counter-mutiny could spring forth. Edd's out, and honestly I forgot what his plan was, but it might involve talking to Melisandre.
Speaking of old Mel, and I mean Old. She's clearly pretty down after both Stannis' death and Jon's. We also find out that that choker she wears makes her look about fifty years younger than she actually is. So, naked old lady (though I think that was Carice Van Houten in make-up.) My words when this was revealed: "Of course she's ancient!"
King's Landing:
Cerise is all excited for Myrcella to come back when a Dornish ship sails into port. But when she sees Jaime and a shroud-covered body on the boat coming in, she realizes what has happened. The breaking of Cersei continues.
Meanwhile, Margaery is still in jail. Not too much development there.
Dorne:
Ok, here some stuff happens. First off, Doran gets a raven telling him about Myrcella's death (damn combination of auto-correct and Martin's just-slightly-different naming conventions,) and just as he does, Elaria Sand stabs him in the heart while one of the Sand Snakes back-stabs Areo Hotah (man, I doubt those who haven't read the books would even know that he has a name.) On the ship back from King's Landing, Trystane is mourning his would-be wife. But not for long, because the two accompanying Sand Snakes come to kill him, and he gets a spear through the back of the head and out the front in this week's most gruesome death.
So the coup in Dorne is in full swing. Too bad Doran didn't get to really do anything.
Winterfell (and Environs:)
Sansa and Theon (I think we can start calling him that again) run from Ramsay's dogs while Ramsay has a moment where he seems almost human, mourning for... that equally sadistic chick who isn't in the books and whose name I can't... Miranda! Mourning Miranda. But then he tells the Maester to feed her to the dogs instead of giving her a proper burial, so, you know, Ramsay's gotta Ramsay.
Anyway, Theon and Sansa flee the Bolton hounds and hound masters, but they're caught despite a desperate icy-river ford. It looks like things are screwed when... Brienne and Podrick come to the rescue! And yes, I did make a "Podrick Brings the Payne" joke when he stuck a sword through one of the Bolton men. Theon even gets a kill, saving Podrick when he's knocked down. Sansa (wisely) accepts Brienne's service this time, and Theon seems to have earned her trust a bit.
Mereen (and Environs:)
The leftover Daenerys party talk over strategy. Mereen's in trouble, between the Sons of the Harpy and slaves who feel she abandoned them (which... yeah kind of.) And there are Red Priests showing up to preach to those people (basically saying Dany was the catalyst, now they have to take the power of flame into their own hands.) Oh, and someone has burned all the ships in the harbor, so it might take a little longer to launch the invasion of Westeros.
Tyrion is left behind with Grey Worm, Missandei, and Varys (the others don't know he's there, I think,) while Daario and Jorah (whose Greyscale infection is spreading along his arm) try to track her, finding the ring she dropped at the end of last season.
Dany is captured by the Dothraki and brought before Khal Maro. Once she reveals she's Drogo's widow, they stop all their talk of murder and rape, but while that's, you know, a step in the right direction, they do insist she go back to Vaes Dothrak to join the Dosh Khaleen - the widows of Khals who serves as a kind of ruling council for the Dothraki but also aren't allowed to leave.
Braavos:
Arya is on the streets as a blind beggar, but it seems this is only part of her training. The Waif (no longer wearing the Jaqen H'gar face - and just to be clear, the Kindly Man at the House of Black and White probably never was Jaqen H'gar. In fact, Jaqen H'gar was probably never Jaqen H'gar. But I wonder if this means that Tom Wiaschiha isn't going to be on the show...? Or maybe he'll be in Sam's story down in Old Town (oh yeah, there's a plot that the show hasn't done. Though it's barely done anything with that in the books either.) Anyway, Arya's still going to get some training, but it'll be extra hard because she's blind.
So as a premiere, this honestly isn't the most mind-blowing. The Melisandre reveal was pretty good, one of those twists you feel stupid for not figuring out beforehand (though what impact it will have is probably minimal.) They're really pushing for Dorne to be a thing, which... well, if you have to, I guess. With the Tyrells unlikely the help thanks to the whole church imprisonment thing, war with the Boltons now on the table (given the brief marriage to the smuggled-out-of-King's-Landing Sansa,) a coming war with Dorne could be really devastating for the Lannisters, and I don't think Cersei is going to even be in power by the time Daenerys gets to Westerns.
I'm hoping next week we get some of the trippy tree-druid stuff with Brann, as we've been waiting since season 4 for that stuff. I think Melisandre reviving Jon is still very much on the table.
It's great that Sansa/Theon and Brienne/Podrick have linked up, but I really don't know where they'll go. Castle Black is not safe territory for them, though they have no reason to know that yet. However, the next-on segment suggests the Boltons might march against Castle Black, which... could actually have some positive effects, as we'd have Bolton vs Thorne, possibly giving Davos (and even Jon, if he does get revived) time to escape.
Oh, was Edd going to get the Wildlings? That might have been it.
Anyway, Clusterfuck is Coming up in the North. Looking forward to next week!
Thursday, April 21, 2016
On The Dark Tower Adaptation
The Dark Tower is important to me. I read Lord of the Rings early in High School and I've read the Song of Ice and Fire books... well, basically after the first season of the show came out. But the Dark Tower is hand-down the most influential and important fantasy series to me personally. I was wary of getting in to King's 2011 interquel, the Wind Through the Keyhole, but now that I've picked it up finally, I find myself falling back into and in love with the series.
Oh, it's certainly flawed. While I liked Wolves of the Calla a lot, I think the three-book series dismount was maybe rushed (King clearly wanted to finish it before he died after getting hit by that truck, but thankfully the man is still around and still writing, so perhaps he could have afforded to take more time.) I remember being nearly furious with the "Coda" ending after the ending that I had both expected and wanted had pretty much happened with the end of the "final" chapter (King does warn the reader, to be fair, that perhaps we should remain outside the Tower.)
While I've wanted a screen adaptation since reading the books, I've also grown to appreciate how difficult that would be to pull off. Game of Thrones has shown that television might be the better medium for adapting such enormous works, and while The Dark Tower books are perhaps not as dense as Martin's thousand-character epic, I'd still want to see proper time given to each character and not lose things like Roland's backstory, or the details of the World that has Moved On.
The project has been in development for so long that it's almost hard to believe it's actually happening.
Idris Elba as Roland certainly came as a bit of a surprise, given that the character as written is white. But looking at Elba's previous performances (I'm thinking John Luther particularly,) I can definitely see him pulling off the intense competence and callous pragmatism that makes Roland such a dangerous protagonist to friend and foe alike. This will certainly change his relationship with the Detta Walker half of Susannah's personality a bit, assuming she gets that same backstory, but overall, I'm really excited to see what Elba does with the role.
Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black is, well, perfect. The odd thing here is I remember hearing that they were making a remake of The Stand and would be casting him as Randall Flagg, which again, is perfect, because they're the same person. Still, Walter O'Dim plays quite a different role from Flagg in this story (actually, that's confusing, because when he appears in Wizard and Glass he is going by the name Flagg, and possibly later in book seven,) but I think that if McConaughey can channel his Rust Cohle nihilism into aggressive malevolence (which shouldn't be hard,) I really think he should be perfect.
Beyond casting, though, what I wonder about is structure. On IMDB, there's no casting information for Eddie or Susannah, but there is for Jake, which suggests to me that they might truly be just doing The Gunslinger as the first movie.
That's a fine place to start, of course, and it's really important as a sort of groundwork-laying for the rest of the batshit crazy series, but it could certainly stand to be polished up a bit. I really wonder how closely the movie (hopefully movies - there's no telling how well it will do) will stick with the overall plot, especially since Wizard and Glass is a seven-hundred page book with a five-hundred page flashback, and at the end of book five, the existence of the series as a series of books becomes part of the plot itself. Also, Song of Susannah, if I remember correctly, doesn't really have much happening in it. And Drawing of the Three is basically an entire novel of character introductions.
I hope that it all works out, but I also don't really know how they could pull it off, let alone whether they will or not. I really hope they do.
I guess we'll find out next year.
Oh, it's certainly flawed. While I liked Wolves of the Calla a lot, I think the three-book series dismount was maybe rushed (King clearly wanted to finish it before he died after getting hit by that truck, but thankfully the man is still around and still writing, so perhaps he could have afforded to take more time.) I remember being nearly furious with the "Coda" ending after the ending that I had both expected and wanted had pretty much happened with the end of the "final" chapter (King does warn the reader, to be fair, that perhaps we should remain outside the Tower.)
While I've wanted a screen adaptation since reading the books, I've also grown to appreciate how difficult that would be to pull off. Game of Thrones has shown that television might be the better medium for adapting such enormous works, and while The Dark Tower books are perhaps not as dense as Martin's thousand-character epic, I'd still want to see proper time given to each character and not lose things like Roland's backstory, or the details of the World that has Moved On.
The project has been in development for so long that it's almost hard to believe it's actually happening.
Idris Elba as Roland certainly came as a bit of a surprise, given that the character as written is white. But looking at Elba's previous performances (I'm thinking John Luther particularly,) I can definitely see him pulling off the intense competence and callous pragmatism that makes Roland such a dangerous protagonist to friend and foe alike. This will certainly change his relationship with the Detta Walker half of Susannah's personality a bit, assuming she gets that same backstory, but overall, I'm really excited to see what Elba does with the role.
Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black is, well, perfect. The odd thing here is I remember hearing that they were making a remake of The Stand and would be casting him as Randall Flagg, which again, is perfect, because they're the same person. Still, Walter O'Dim plays quite a different role from Flagg in this story (actually, that's confusing, because when he appears in Wizard and Glass he is going by the name Flagg, and possibly later in book seven,) but I think that if McConaughey can channel his Rust Cohle nihilism into aggressive malevolence (which shouldn't be hard,) I really think he should be perfect.
Beyond casting, though, what I wonder about is structure. On IMDB, there's no casting information for Eddie or Susannah, but there is for Jake, which suggests to me that they might truly be just doing The Gunslinger as the first movie.
That's a fine place to start, of course, and it's really important as a sort of groundwork-laying for the rest of the batshit crazy series, but it could certainly stand to be polished up a bit. I really wonder how closely the movie (hopefully movies - there's no telling how well it will do) will stick with the overall plot, especially since Wizard and Glass is a seven-hundred page book with a five-hundred page flashback, and at the end of book five, the existence of the series as a series of books becomes part of the plot itself. Also, Song of Susannah, if I remember correctly, doesn't really have much happening in it. And Drawing of the Three is basically an entire novel of character introductions.
I hope that it all works out, but I also don't really know how they could pull it off, let alone whether they will or not. I really hope they do.
I guess we'll find out next year.
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
The Magician's Land
I just, in roughly 24 hours, read through The Magician's Land, the third book in The Magicians Trilogy.
In what is probably always a bad idea, I shortly thereafter read not only a review (which I mostly agreed with) but also the comment section beneath said review.
Though I was never a big Narnia fan (in fact, I've never read the entirety of any of the books - just the first couple chapters of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - I'd say that I might have subconsciously rejected Lewis' insistent prostheltyzing except that I was fully unaware of it and probably hadn't gotten far enough to really be exposed to it) I'm certainly the kind of person who can relate a lot to the books' protagonist, Quentin Coldwater. I, too, am a fantasy-loving nerd who wishes the world were filled with mystery and hidden power that could be tapped by, essentially, having the kind of obsessive personality that such a nerd tends to have. The first book in the series is a pretty nasty gut-punch for folks like us - essentially giving Quentin everything he's dreamed of, but leaving him unsatisfied at best and devastated at worst.
While that first book does end on a last-page reversal that allows for the possibility of happiness in Quentin's future, it's still pretty bleak.
In some ways, the first book stands on its own the easiest (not uncommon for the first volumes of series that are often not written to be part of a series - take Dune for example.) That said, when reading it I was sort of frustrated by its lack of plot - it sped through years of events in a kind of episodic format until one of the earlier episodes was called back to in the end. Partially it feels spread out because of the dual-world-building going on. The secret, Potter-esque magical world built up with Brakebills University doesn't quite pay off because everything is whisked away to the Narnia-equivalent Fillory.
The second book has pretty much two different plots going on - one that runs parallel with the first book, giving Julia - who had been a very minor character in book one - a thorough and harrowing backstory. The other plot is perhaps thinner, starting with a Quentin who has at least something to enjoy despite the loss he suffered in the first book and ends with him finally, truly becoming the hero of his own story, with devastating consequences.
So then book three spreads the plot between a few more characters - actually, Julia kind of drops back into the minor roles, though you could argue that she had a full, satisfying arc in the second book, and why mess with a good thing? Ultimately, though, Quentin is finally given the opportunity to tie up his loose ends. In a way, the ultimate consummation of his fantasies is achieved, and he has the maturity to recognize this.
I'm wondering about throwing up a spoiler tag here, just because I feel like I should touch on the specifics of what happens at the end of the book. Yeah, let's do that.
Spoilers.
In what is probably always a bad idea, I shortly thereafter read not only a review (which I mostly agreed with) but also the comment section beneath said review.
Though I was never a big Narnia fan (in fact, I've never read the entirety of any of the books - just the first couple chapters of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - I'd say that I might have subconsciously rejected Lewis' insistent prostheltyzing except that I was fully unaware of it and probably hadn't gotten far enough to really be exposed to it) I'm certainly the kind of person who can relate a lot to the books' protagonist, Quentin Coldwater. I, too, am a fantasy-loving nerd who wishes the world were filled with mystery and hidden power that could be tapped by, essentially, having the kind of obsessive personality that such a nerd tends to have. The first book in the series is a pretty nasty gut-punch for folks like us - essentially giving Quentin everything he's dreamed of, but leaving him unsatisfied at best and devastated at worst.
While that first book does end on a last-page reversal that allows for the possibility of happiness in Quentin's future, it's still pretty bleak.
In some ways, the first book stands on its own the easiest (not uncommon for the first volumes of series that are often not written to be part of a series - take Dune for example.) That said, when reading it I was sort of frustrated by its lack of plot - it sped through years of events in a kind of episodic format until one of the earlier episodes was called back to in the end. Partially it feels spread out because of the dual-world-building going on. The secret, Potter-esque magical world built up with Brakebills University doesn't quite pay off because everything is whisked away to the Narnia-equivalent Fillory.
The second book has pretty much two different plots going on - one that runs parallel with the first book, giving Julia - who had been a very minor character in book one - a thorough and harrowing backstory. The other plot is perhaps thinner, starting with a Quentin who has at least something to enjoy despite the loss he suffered in the first book and ends with him finally, truly becoming the hero of his own story, with devastating consequences.
So then book three spreads the plot between a few more characters - actually, Julia kind of drops back into the minor roles, though you could argue that she had a full, satisfying arc in the second book, and why mess with a good thing? Ultimately, though, Quentin is finally given the opportunity to tie up his loose ends. In a way, the ultimate consummation of his fantasies is achieved, and he has the maturity to recognize this.
I'm wondering about throwing up a spoiler tag here, just because I feel like I should touch on the specifics of what happens at the end of the book. Yeah, let's do that.
Spoilers.
Sunday, April 10, 2016
Solipsism and Time Travel: Stephen King's 11/22/63
Thanks in large part to the Hulu series (which has finished, though I have yet to see the final episode,) I picked up Stephen King's 11/22/63 and have been reading it. It might be unfashionable to admit (though I also feel like so-called low culture has become less taboo in recent years) but King's one of my favorite authors. (Actually, I think he's one of those authors whose popularity and prolificness make him a default target for snobs - in a few decades he'll be considered a great of American literature, if he isn't already.) The Dark Tower series was an enormous influence on me - the novel set in Otherworld that I've been working on (and procrastinating around) since I was 17 and is the backbone of the setting around which my Dispatches from Otherworld stories revolve began as a pretty bald-faced attempt to write my own unofficial Roland Deschain story.
King hasn't been quite as prominent since he semi-quasi-pseudo retired after the last Dark Tower book, but his story about time travel and Lee Harvey Oswald is probably the most well-respected thing he's written in recent years.
I haven't finished the novel yet (in fact, I'm nearly synchronized with the penultimate episode of the show) but it's got me thinking about Time Travel.
If you ever read the first post on this blog about its namesake, you'll know that I've been a time-travel obsessive since I was little. No, I don't think that there have been any time travelers throughout history and I think that it might actually just be a physical impossibility. But as grounds for thought experiments, it's basically my mind's favorite park to stroll through on a spring afternoon.
King is not a science fiction writer. There's no attempt to explain any kind of technology that allows the protagonist of his novel to go back in time, which is fine by me. There's a place for sci-fi that goes into deep detail about how things are done (The Martian, for example, is such hard sci-fi that it almost comes off as not being sci-fi at all.) But I suppose because I am someone who believes in a rational universe that obeys all these physical laws without variation but also simultaneously find such a universe kind of boring, I gladly welcome King's supernatural mystery.
I classify King as a dark fantasy writer (the line between dark fantasy and horror is a faint one, but I think he's on the fantasy side of it,) but one of the things I love about his style is that it doesn't get caught up in clarifying things. There might be godlike beings that oppose or aid our heroes, but they're left so abstract that we feel like we can instead pay attention to the people.
King also devises a pretty unusual style of time travel for his story. Every time travel story has to make a decision about how it works. Most often you get the Back to the Future style, where the past can be changed, but the heroes must worry about paradoxes that result of their changes. Twelve Monkeys is one in which the past is unchanged - if you travel back into the past, you always did, and so even if you take an active role in the past, you aren't changing it because you were always there in the first place. These allow what I think of as "weak paradoxes," like a piece of information spawning itself (like the Song of Storms in Zelda: Ocarina of Time) but do not allow "strong paradoxes" like the grandfather paradox because the fact that you are there in the first place means that your grandfather clearly lived to conceive your parent.
But 11/22/63 makes things rigid yet malleable in a way that sets aside a lot of these questions in favor of far weirder ones.
In the story, there is a doorway in a diner that allows one to enter the exact same moment in 1958 (1960 on the TV show) every time you go down. You can spend as much time as you want in the past, with time progressing normally after that moment in 1958 for you, and once you feel like going back, you can walk back up through the doorway and come out and see the future adjusted by your actions. On the modern side of the doorway, no matter whether you spent two seconds or two decades in the past, only two minutes will have passed in the modern world.
Step in again, and you're back in 1958, and anything you did to the past the last time around is wiped clean.
So first off, this means that there is a "real" version of history. If you just hop in and out, barring some really shocking butterfly effect (though given enough time, maybe that would accumulate one,) it will reset things to that real version.
It also means duplication is possible. The main character, Jake, is introduced to the doorway by Al, the owner of the diner in which the door is found. The guy sells $1.50 "Fatburgers" that a lot of people steer clear of due to the low cost, fearing there must be something wrong with the meat.
But in fact, the meat is fine, and it's super-cheap because he buys it in 1958. And not only is he buying 1958 ground beef, but he's also buying the exact same beef over and over. He knows it's good because it's literally the same cow (or cows) that his customers are consuming over and over. That same (poor, butchered) cow is being eaten multiple times by all his customers. On his second (well, technically third, but the first was just to show him the doorway in the first place) time through, Jake finds himself buying a blue shirt. The salesman comments that it's clearly his favorite color, given the shirt he's currently wearing. In the narration, Jake mentions that in fact, the shirt he is wearing is actually the same shirt that he's currently wearing.
Shirts and the meat of a cow who dies before all this duplication occurs are amusing in a head-spinning sort of way, but when it comes to people, really big questions start to come up. People (not just JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald) live or die based on the actions that Jake takes while in the past. If he's truly wiping the board clean with each reset, what does that mean for the consciousness of those people?
We would generally imagine that our fellow human beings have an internal conscious experience - call it a soul if you want. So while the experience of the time traveler (and it would seem those who are near the doorway, like diner owner Al and... maybe... the "Yellow Card Man" in 1958, a drunk who is by the doorway and is the only one who seems aware of Jake's interloper status) accounts for all the changes made in history (if we assume that's all the Yellow Card Man is, then perhaps he's nuts because all those changes are happening simultaneously in his experience) everyone else in the world seems only aware of the version of history they're currently living.
But if we consider them the same person they were in previous iterations, that raises the following question: When do they experience the change? Obviously they don't remember it, but is there a kind of blink, and one goes from being crippled and brain-damaged to healthy and living a better life? Does one go from whatever the consciousness experiences in death (if anything) to suddenly alive or vice versa?
Or perhaps our consciousness experiences time in a more sophisticated way than the brains that actually process our thoughts can. This is a whole other can of worms, but I've often been fascinated by the idea that we might actually perceive things that we nevertheless can't actually think about because our brains aren't the things perceiving them. But that's for another day.
The idea of multiple timelines has always kind of implied that there's a sort of perpendicular dimension of time. We generally think of the universe in terms of three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. But multiple timelines could kind of give width as well as the familiar length to the flow of time.
Yet in a way this is horrific in its own way. I actually thought about this when watching, of all things, the second Austin Powers movie. In it, Dr. Evil travels back to the 60s in a plan to... something about defeating Powers while he's cryogenically frozen (I haven't watched this movie in like 16 years.) His henchman cheer him on as he jumps through his time machine portal, but I remember thinking that there were only two things that they could expect to happen. Either Dr. Evil comes out the thing looking disappointed, or he just never arrives.
Because if he changed the past, then he never would have been incentivized to do this in the first place. He must fail, or more horrifically, he must cease to exist entirely. If he moves on to a timeline in which he is successful, then all those henchmen are left behind in a timeline Dr. Evil will never return to.
Or most horrifically of all, those people, and that entire universe, cease to exist.
Unless people have transdimensional consciousnesses, these acts of time travel are inherently kind of solipsistic. From your perspective, if you are saving a loved one from some horrible injury or disease (something I have sadly been forced to consider in recent weeks,) going and warning them or rescuing them armed with your foreknowledge looks from your perspective like you've saved that person and all is now well.
But there are serious possibilities that you're actually abandoning that person and merely happily replacing them with another person who is very similar.
Jumping timelines like this is a little like something I wrote about in a college philosophy class in an essay titled "Riker's Complaint." In Star Trek: The Next Generation, we discover that due to a transporter accident, there was a perfect duplicate made of Will Riker on another planet. Setting aside the horror that is the Star Trek transporter (which should really be called the Cloner/Murderer,) the duplicate (who goes by his middle name to become Tom Riker to make things less confusing) was left behind because his cremates were perfectly satisfied with the Riker they had.
If time travel creates all these duplicates (and the Fatburger seems to imply that, at least if you take them back with you, it does) then you run into the scary possibility that you're actually leaving behind a universe of Tom Rikers every time you take another crack at changing the past.
The solipsism comes in if you basically don't mind that. If you're the only conscious being, then the existence of the duplicates doesn't really worry you. A solipsist believes that the universe exists for their benefit (mind you, solipsism is impossible to disprove, and I don't think that solipsism inherently makes you a bad person, as long as you recognize that even if you are the only conscious being, it feels bad to be an asshole to people,) so in a sense, a timeline that they can never return to and never perceive again is philosophically indistinguishable from one that merely doesn't exist, or one that has been changed into the one they currently inhabit.
Narratively, King seems to imply that the timeline does change, and that however alien and incomprehensible the experience might be, the people in that changing timeline are the same people. But the Fatburger does introduce some doubt into that. There's multiples of that meat. Are we to believe that there's not a universe to correspond to each hunk of it?
(EDIT)
Having now finished the book, the explanation of what the Yellow/Orange/Black/Green Card Man (Men) are (vague though it is) actually makes some of these thoughts text, rather than subtext. Still, always good for a bit of writing to provoke some new thoughts.
King hasn't been quite as prominent since he semi-quasi-pseudo retired after the last Dark Tower book, but his story about time travel and Lee Harvey Oswald is probably the most well-respected thing he's written in recent years.
I haven't finished the novel yet (in fact, I'm nearly synchronized with the penultimate episode of the show) but it's got me thinking about Time Travel.
If you ever read the first post on this blog about its namesake, you'll know that I've been a time-travel obsessive since I was little. No, I don't think that there have been any time travelers throughout history and I think that it might actually just be a physical impossibility. But as grounds for thought experiments, it's basically my mind's favorite park to stroll through on a spring afternoon.
King is not a science fiction writer. There's no attempt to explain any kind of technology that allows the protagonist of his novel to go back in time, which is fine by me. There's a place for sci-fi that goes into deep detail about how things are done (The Martian, for example, is such hard sci-fi that it almost comes off as not being sci-fi at all.) But I suppose because I am someone who believes in a rational universe that obeys all these physical laws without variation but also simultaneously find such a universe kind of boring, I gladly welcome King's supernatural mystery.
I classify King as a dark fantasy writer (the line between dark fantasy and horror is a faint one, but I think he's on the fantasy side of it,) but one of the things I love about his style is that it doesn't get caught up in clarifying things. There might be godlike beings that oppose or aid our heroes, but they're left so abstract that we feel like we can instead pay attention to the people.
King also devises a pretty unusual style of time travel for his story. Every time travel story has to make a decision about how it works. Most often you get the Back to the Future style, where the past can be changed, but the heroes must worry about paradoxes that result of their changes. Twelve Monkeys is one in which the past is unchanged - if you travel back into the past, you always did, and so even if you take an active role in the past, you aren't changing it because you were always there in the first place. These allow what I think of as "weak paradoxes," like a piece of information spawning itself (like the Song of Storms in Zelda: Ocarina of Time) but do not allow "strong paradoxes" like the grandfather paradox because the fact that you are there in the first place means that your grandfather clearly lived to conceive your parent.
But 11/22/63 makes things rigid yet malleable in a way that sets aside a lot of these questions in favor of far weirder ones.
In the story, there is a doorway in a diner that allows one to enter the exact same moment in 1958 (1960 on the TV show) every time you go down. You can spend as much time as you want in the past, with time progressing normally after that moment in 1958 for you, and once you feel like going back, you can walk back up through the doorway and come out and see the future adjusted by your actions. On the modern side of the doorway, no matter whether you spent two seconds or two decades in the past, only two minutes will have passed in the modern world.
Step in again, and you're back in 1958, and anything you did to the past the last time around is wiped clean.
So first off, this means that there is a "real" version of history. If you just hop in and out, barring some really shocking butterfly effect (though given enough time, maybe that would accumulate one,) it will reset things to that real version.
It also means duplication is possible. The main character, Jake, is introduced to the doorway by Al, the owner of the diner in which the door is found. The guy sells $1.50 "Fatburgers" that a lot of people steer clear of due to the low cost, fearing there must be something wrong with the meat.
But in fact, the meat is fine, and it's super-cheap because he buys it in 1958. And not only is he buying 1958 ground beef, but he's also buying the exact same beef over and over. He knows it's good because it's literally the same cow (or cows) that his customers are consuming over and over. That same (poor, butchered) cow is being eaten multiple times by all his customers. On his second (well, technically third, but the first was just to show him the doorway in the first place) time through, Jake finds himself buying a blue shirt. The salesman comments that it's clearly his favorite color, given the shirt he's currently wearing. In the narration, Jake mentions that in fact, the shirt he is wearing is actually the same shirt that he's currently wearing.
Shirts and the meat of a cow who dies before all this duplication occurs are amusing in a head-spinning sort of way, but when it comes to people, really big questions start to come up. People (not just JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald) live or die based on the actions that Jake takes while in the past. If he's truly wiping the board clean with each reset, what does that mean for the consciousness of those people?
We would generally imagine that our fellow human beings have an internal conscious experience - call it a soul if you want. So while the experience of the time traveler (and it would seem those who are near the doorway, like diner owner Al and... maybe... the "Yellow Card Man" in 1958, a drunk who is by the doorway and is the only one who seems aware of Jake's interloper status) accounts for all the changes made in history (if we assume that's all the Yellow Card Man is, then perhaps he's nuts because all those changes are happening simultaneously in his experience) everyone else in the world seems only aware of the version of history they're currently living.
But if we consider them the same person they were in previous iterations, that raises the following question: When do they experience the change? Obviously they don't remember it, but is there a kind of blink, and one goes from being crippled and brain-damaged to healthy and living a better life? Does one go from whatever the consciousness experiences in death (if anything) to suddenly alive or vice versa?
Or perhaps our consciousness experiences time in a more sophisticated way than the brains that actually process our thoughts can. This is a whole other can of worms, but I've often been fascinated by the idea that we might actually perceive things that we nevertheless can't actually think about because our brains aren't the things perceiving them. But that's for another day.
The idea of multiple timelines has always kind of implied that there's a sort of perpendicular dimension of time. We generally think of the universe in terms of three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. But multiple timelines could kind of give width as well as the familiar length to the flow of time.
Yet in a way this is horrific in its own way. I actually thought about this when watching, of all things, the second Austin Powers movie. In it, Dr. Evil travels back to the 60s in a plan to... something about defeating Powers while he's cryogenically frozen (I haven't watched this movie in like 16 years.) His henchman cheer him on as he jumps through his time machine portal, but I remember thinking that there were only two things that they could expect to happen. Either Dr. Evil comes out the thing looking disappointed, or he just never arrives.
Because if he changed the past, then he never would have been incentivized to do this in the first place. He must fail, or more horrifically, he must cease to exist entirely. If he moves on to a timeline in which he is successful, then all those henchmen are left behind in a timeline Dr. Evil will never return to.
Or most horrifically of all, those people, and that entire universe, cease to exist.
Unless people have transdimensional consciousnesses, these acts of time travel are inherently kind of solipsistic. From your perspective, if you are saving a loved one from some horrible injury or disease (something I have sadly been forced to consider in recent weeks,) going and warning them or rescuing them armed with your foreknowledge looks from your perspective like you've saved that person and all is now well.
But there are serious possibilities that you're actually abandoning that person and merely happily replacing them with another person who is very similar.
Jumping timelines like this is a little like something I wrote about in a college philosophy class in an essay titled "Riker's Complaint." In Star Trek: The Next Generation, we discover that due to a transporter accident, there was a perfect duplicate made of Will Riker on another planet. Setting aside the horror that is the Star Trek transporter (which should really be called the Cloner/Murderer,) the duplicate (who goes by his middle name to become Tom Riker to make things less confusing) was left behind because his cremates were perfectly satisfied with the Riker they had.
If time travel creates all these duplicates (and the Fatburger seems to imply that, at least if you take them back with you, it does) then you run into the scary possibility that you're actually leaving behind a universe of Tom Rikers every time you take another crack at changing the past.
The solipsism comes in if you basically don't mind that. If you're the only conscious being, then the existence of the duplicates doesn't really worry you. A solipsist believes that the universe exists for their benefit (mind you, solipsism is impossible to disprove, and I don't think that solipsism inherently makes you a bad person, as long as you recognize that even if you are the only conscious being, it feels bad to be an asshole to people,) so in a sense, a timeline that they can never return to and never perceive again is philosophically indistinguishable from one that merely doesn't exist, or one that has been changed into the one they currently inhabit.
Narratively, King seems to imply that the timeline does change, and that however alien and incomprehensible the experience might be, the people in that changing timeline are the same people. But the Fatburger does introduce some doubt into that. There's multiples of that meat. Are we to believe that there's not a universe to correspond to each hunk of it?
(EDIT)
Having now finished the book, the explanation of what the Yellow/Orange/Black/Green Card Man (Men) are (vague though it is) actually makes some of these thoughts text, rather than subtext. Still, always good for a bit of writing to provoke some new thoughts.
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