FANTASTIC FOUR: WORLD WAR TWO, or, How I would Try and Fail To Screw Up A Fantastic Four Movie

Roger Corman screwed it up. Tim Story screwed it up (twice!). Josh Trank screwed it up.

Clearly, it's way too easy to screw up making a Fantastic Four movie. There may be a curse involved. So how to get around that? Easy: You set out with the intent to make a Fantastic Four movie outside normal canon. That way, the screwing up gets screwed up, and you end up with a successful movie after all! It's a case where using a double negative is the only way to go.

So, here's my plan:

First, we're not going to use those silly "superpowers" at all. That clandestine space launch, the cosmic rays, all of that is out the window. Instead, the story will take place before any of that happens. That's right, my FF movie will be a prequel!

If you go all the way back to the original comics from the early 1960's, there's interesting back story given to the characters. Both Reed Richards and Ben Grimm fought in World War II. Reed was an undercover operative in Europe, working with the Resistance against the Nazis, while Ben was a fighter pilot, doing his own bit against Hitler.

Nazis and Hitler! It's a foolproof scenario. If the story starts to lag, punch a Nazi. Works every time. (See: the Indiana Jones movies. Nazis involved? Whoo-hoo! No Nazis? Meh.)

So, we'll have Reed and Ben in Europe during WWII. But Reed's on the ground, Ben's in the air. What kind of story do we need to get them together? And where are Sue and Johnny Storm, and how do we make them part of this story? Especially since Johnny, even going by the original continuity, wouldn't have been born yet.

Well, let's just dump Johnny Storm, then. Fortunately, there's another character from Marvel backhistory who can serve in his place....

Among the various versions of Fantastic Four history and backstory that have been retconned, alternate-Earthed, or conveniently ignored over the past six decades, I'd borrow several pieces and make them my own.

What? Of course I can screw around with canon and continuity. It's now established in the Marvel Universe that there are multiple universes, with multiple versions of the same characters, but different, each existing in their own timelines. It means you can do pretty much anything you want to do with characters and canon, It's just one more variant in the multiverse, and only Marvel's lawyers can stop you!

Let us proceed:

Pre America's entry into WWII, Sue Storm is the brainy teen-age daughter of Franklin Storm, a professor who leads a program to recruit and develop young scientific prodigies to aid the American government. (Howard Stark is involved in this somewhere, you betcha.) But because of her youth (about age 14-15 at this time) and because she's a girl (girl cooties! eek!), she's not taken seriously, even though she's brilliant enough to qualify for the program if she were male.

Said prodigies are boarded in Professor Storm's large home while attending their advanced classes at Big Brain University, and include Reed Richards, who shares the room being vacated by Victor von Doom; Doom, son of Latverian aristocrats, is returning to Europe to fight the Nazis who've invaded and occupied Latveria. Ben Grimm is also around Big Brain U, on a football scholarship while he pursues an engineering degree and races fast planes in his spare time. (The team motto of BBU's football team is, of course, "It's Clobberin' Time!") He also teaches Sue to fly a plane; through Sue, he meets Reed, who becomes a good friend.

Hah! See what I did there? "Invisible" Sue, "Clobberin' Time" Ben? I'm taking away those superpowers and replacing them with metaphors! Because I am one of those high-falutin' artsy-fartsy literary fuckers. Who likes to punch Nazis.

[Note to self: Have some "High-Falutin' Artsy-Fartsy Literary Fucker" business cards printed up.]

Fast-forward a few years. America is in the midst of WWII. Professor Franklin has been recruited into a top-secret program somewhere in the American Southwest, effectively ending the program at Big Brain U. Students have scattered, and most have enlisted, been drafted, or are working for the war effort.

Sue followed up on her unofficial flight training, and is now a WASP. No, this has nothing to do with Ant-Man. Women Air Service Pilots served to release male pilots for overseas and combat duty, by serving as instructors and trainers, and by flying newly-built planes from factories to military bases in North America. Regular (male) flight crews then flew the planes to oversea bases. So we need a way for Sue to be flying planes to Europe, counter to actual history.

Ben Grimm is an American fighter pilot based in England. (This is a change from original canon, where he flew in the Pacific side of the war.) He has stayed in touch with Sue and Reed by mail, and they try to meet up in London whenever their schedules coincide. Reed's the one most often unavailable, for classified reasons.

Reed has told Ben he's a paper-pusher in an office somewhere in the war bureaucracy. Reed is lying out his wazoo. In actuality, Reed makes clandestine undercover missions into Europe to try and extract Allied-friendly scientists and/or recover their research, or to steal or destroy Germany's own scientific programs and scientists, and to lend his scientific expertise to Resistance units. (Another Howard Stark idea, most likely.) Reed is actually very good at things like making IEDs ("two paperclips and a ham sandwich"), or turning the barbed-wire fence of a POW camp into a radio receiver/transmitter, as well as other skills he's picked up.

So, let's have a go at what sort of film synopsis might exist for:

FANTASTIC FOUR: WORLD WAR TWO

(Because this is pretty long -- about 7500 words -- I'm putting a jump break here.)

Fort Lee --->>> Fort Gregg-Adams: A Trip Thru History and Memory

[note: This piece by me first appeared, in slightly different form, as a reply to a comment in Mike Glyer's fannish newszine File 770 mentioning the US military was changing the names of installations that had been named for Confederate officers.]

Fort Lee, VA, where I spent most of my Army enlistment, is, on April 27th, being renamed Fort Gregg-Adams after two notable Black officers, Lieutenant-General Arthur Gregg and LtCol Charity Adams.

Gregg’s early military career, starting shortly after WW2, veered toward the Quartermaster Corps and logistical achievements when, trained as a medical lab technician, he was assigned to a post where there were no lab technician slots for Black soldiers (the Army was still segregated at that point) and ended up as supply sergeant for a Transportation company (read: truck-drivers); he remained with the Quartermaster Corps for the rest of his career.

Charity Adams was the first Black woman officer in the WAAC (Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, later WAC) in WW2. She commanded the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only all-woman battalion sent overseas during wartime, first to England and, after V-E Day, to France, responsible for sorting and processing mail for millions of soldiers and civilian workers, as well as resolving horrendous backlogs of undelivered mail, some several years old.

I note this much about them because aspects of their careers resonate with my own military service.

Gregg because I was trained as a photo lab tech and sent to Fort Lee (Quartermaster Corps HQ), where it turned out while there was a slot in the TO for a PLT, there wasn’t any actual photo lab work to be done. I ended up spending most of my Army career as a company clerk in the truck-driving company down the street from the Signal company I was originally assigned to. (Turned out to be a much better fit for me too.)

And Adams because one of the other clerks in that truck-driving company talked me into taking the Postal Exam shortly before my enlistment ended, eventually resulting in a permanent job and 30-year career with USPS with concomitant medical insurance and eventual pension. (Thanks, dude whose name I can’t goddam remember!)

Just kinda bemused at the serendipitous commonalities.

[Final note, because it's pretty damn cool : Gregg, 94, will become the only living person in modern Army history to have a base named after him]

BONUS: Below is a picture of what I'm fairly sure is the barracks I lived in during most of my service at Fort Lee fifty years ago. If it is, my room (Company clerk got a semi-private room, but the other guy assigned to it lived off-post and only kept spare uniforms in the room. Nice for me) would have been on the first floor's closest corner. One time I accidentally locked myself out and had to remove the window screen and climb in like a burglar. Did I mention this was right across the street from Fort Lee's Military Police HQ? Amazingly, none of them noticed.

Where Else You Can Find Me

The recent trashfires at Twitter have gotten me off my sluggish ass to set up a new social media account at Mastodon earlier tonight. Here's a link to the paint's-still-wet page:

https://mstdn.plus/@BruceArthursAZ

I have a second account on Twitter, GOBI - Great Old Book Illustrations, which presents (mostly) 19th-century book illustrations found (mostly) on the British National Library's huge image archive on Flickr, with some cleanup & adjustments in Paintshop Pro. Haven't set up a Mastodon account for it yet; will edit this post as soon as I have a URL available.

No one knows if Twitter will last at all, or in what form and ambience if it does. I'll continue to post and comment on Twitter for now, but every day it feels like the Weeping Angels are getting closer and closer.  For the moment, I'll try to post at both Mastodon and Twitter, where suitable. 

Here are Twitter links to my accounts there, at least as long as they continue to exist:

My general account: https://twitter.com/BruceArthursAZ 

And the "GOBI - Great Old Book Illustrations" account: https://twitter.com/BruceArthurs4 

REVIEW: MICHAEL'S CRAG, by Grant Allen, 1893

MICHAEL'S CRAG is an 1893 novella by Grant Allen, a popular Victorian writer of fiction and non-fiction alike. I came across it via my "GOBI - Great Old Book Illustrations" account on Twitter, where I featured several of the 350 silhouette-styled illustrations by father-son artists Francis Carruthers Gould and Alec Carruthers Gould that originally appeared in the book's margins. The fine mustachioed gentleman at right is one of the illustrations.

I found the novella both intriguing and confounding. Set in the Cornwall coast of England, a very big “Chekhov’s Gun” is revealed early on; one of the main characters, Trevennack, an important figure in the Admiralty, is actually the Archangel Michael… or so he believes himself to be. He is, of course, utterly delusional.

So my expectation was that at some point Trevennack’s delusion would be revealed to more than just his long-suffering and horrified wife, that the Chekhov’s Gun would be fired, and various dramatic or comedic consequences would result. (The film THE RULING CLASS was in the back of my mind.)

But… that never happens. When Trevennack’s delusion finally take full occupancy of his mind, it’s when he is alone in the countryside, where he sees a large aggressive black ram as Satan, leading to a struggle that ends in a fatal fall over a cliff. Only his wife, and the doctor whose autopsy discovers a large blood clot in Trevennack’s brain, know the truth. None of the other characters, Trevennack’s daughter or friends or acquaintances, ever know more than that he sometimes said strange things or acted oddly.

My initial reaction was “Well, this Grant Allen fellow didn’t know how to structure or plot a story very well.” But then I thought about it some more, and realized that the entire purpose of the novella was to serve as a paean to British reticence and propriety.

Because insanity wasn’t just a shameful thing to have in your family, it was a blight on your family, as madness was still largely believed to be an inheritable trait, and if there was even a possibility that Trevennack’s daughter Cleer might ever inherit her father’s madness, her marriage prospects would be ruined, along with the family’s social standing.

So a good part of the story, the sections where we see Trevennack’s inner mind, is about his inner struggle to maintain a normal appearance and behavior. Because, up until his final end, there’s still a small portion of Trevennack’s mind that realizes his angelic nature can only be a delusion, even though he also knows, is also certain, that he is in deed and in fact the Archangel Michael. So, for propriety and for the sake of his family, Trevennack manages to keep that British “stiff upper lip” and proper behavior almost until the very last.

Looked at from that perspective, Trevennack’s death, and the solitude of its circumstance, is the happy ending of the story. He maintained propriety. He maintained appearances. He ensured the continued fortune and fates of his family. He maintained the status quo of upper-class British society.

The paean to propriety is further reinforced by the secondary plot narrative. The daughter, Cleer, mis-times a walk out to a rugged, rocky tidal island (where a pathway is revealed at low tide) and is stranded when the evening high tide comes in. A prospective suitor, Eustace, tries to swim the gap in a dimwitted attempt to rescue Cleer, only to barely reach the island, badly battered and bruised from being tossed among the rocks. So both Cleer and Eustace are stranded overnight on the epynomous crag until low tide returns.

Well! An unmarried couple spending the night together?! Alone?! That’s a scandal, sir, a scandal! (Even if the night was spent cold, wet, rained upon, and with Eustace barely able to move.) So of course the two of them must be married now! No acceptable alternative exists! Ha-rumph! So once again the rigid rules of society follow their inevitable, respectable path.

So, if you want a peek at British societal customs and attitudes circa the 1890s, MICHAEL’S CRAG is actually a pretty good choice, I think. The book also features some very effective descriptions of the Cornwall countryside and coast, making it seem both bleak and beautiful.

(first appeared, in slightly different form, in Last Stage For Silverworld, March 2022)

Blowing the Dust Off This Blog

Most of my social media has been via Twitter for... a while. But occasionally I still feel the need for a longer format.  And, somewhat less occasionally, I actually find the time to write those longer pieces.

So, cranking up the good intentions (oh, that's a dangerous phrase), I'm going to try and start posting stuff on Undulant Fever more often. (A fair deal of material, like the review of a vintage book I'll be putting into a separate post, may be reprinted from Last Stage For Silverworld, a print-only apazine I've been doing since 1979.)

Checking the "Statistics" page for this blog, I'm somewhat amazed to find that a handful of people are still looking at (or at least having it pop up in Google results) UF every day. Guess I'll find out if having new material drives those numbers up.

(illustration by Christiana Mary Demain Hammond, 1893)

Some Words Sparked By My High School's Upcoming Reunion

My old high school's 50-Year Reunion (delayed a year by the pandemic) is upcoming in October. Received an email about it, with a link to a website that helps reunion committees organize the things. Posted a few things on my profile there, which I though I'd share here (where, honestly, it's more likely to be read).

First was a synopsis of my life since high school:

After high school, I went to ASU for several years, served in the US Army for three years, went back to college for a while, worked as a legal secretary, spent thirty years with the US Postal Service, then another dozen years working in the security field. Finally took full retirement in March 2020, which was pretty good timing to start spending most of my days at home.

Also in there, I somehow ended up with a wife and stepson. Hilde and I have been together for 45 years. I don't believe in miracles as a general rule, but that comes as close as anything can. I'd always expected to probably end up one of those wild-eyed hermits who live in a shack in the deep woods.

And... my interest in science fiction (which was a source of distress and disapproval from teachers and family alike, back in those days before every blockbuster movie was sci-fi; my Twitter profile reads "Mom always said reading science fiction would rot my mind, ruin my morals, and lead to hanging out with disreputable characters. Thank God, she was right.") lead to occasional success with writing the stuff. I've had about twenty short stories published over the years (including several in the mystery/crime fiction genre), edited two anthologies, and...

...wrote an episode of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION. ("Clues", 4th Season, 1991). That moment when the writer credits roll by is what I call "My one-point-five seconds of fame."

After managing to sell that script, I spent several years trying to sell movie scripts; some got expressions of interest from and meetings with production companies, but no one ever put money or a contract on the table.

(Scriptwriting is tremendously difficult to break into, and almost as hard to stay in. Now that I'm retired, I'm thinking of giving it another shot.)

There you go; fifty years in just over three hundred words.

The reunion site also asked for my "Favorite School Story". Wel-l-l-l-l, "favorite" isn't a word I've ever applied to my high school experiences. And after fifty years, my fucks-to-give supply has grown low enough to not whitewash what was mostly an unhappy time:

What I most remember about high school is that a good day was being just numb, instead of miserable. I remember feeling disassociated from the school, the teachers, and the other students. Not so much ostracized (though there were definite moments of that) as irrelevant and invisible to almost everyone else.

I had "acquaintances" with other students; some were even "friendly acquaintances". But there were only a very scant handful of people I considered actual "friends".

Remember Richard S. Cantor, the journalism teacher? He let the journalism room he oversaw be a refuge for outsiders and weirdos like me. Not sure I would have survived high school without that safe space to occasionally retreat to.

(When I first got onto the Internet, my first "find people you knew" search was for Mr. Cantor. It led me to his obituary; he'd died of cancer a few years before, still in his early 50's. I'm sorry I was never able to let him know how much his empathy meant, to me and others.)

Sorry if you were expecting to read a feel-good story. For some of us, high school wasn't the wonderful experience a lot of people like to pretend it was.

Out of a graduating class of over 700, only a few dozen have registered on the reunion page so far, and only a handful have bought tickets to the reunion dinner. And (as with previous reunion years), almost everyone that I might be interested in seeing or talking with again is on the "Missing" list. So I'm not likely to attend.

A Few Thots On Some Old Tarzan Movies

Hilde and I have been watching old Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies from the 1930s & '40s, via DVDs from Netflix. Not all were available, but we’ve watched TARZAN AND HIS MATE, TARZAN FINDS A SON, TARZAN’S SECRET TREASURE, and TARZAN’S NEW YORK ADVENTURE.

TARZAN AND HIS MATE was filmed before the prudishness of the Hays Code began in 1934, but released into theaters as the Code was starting to be put into effect. Maureen O'Sullivan's very skimpy outfit (see below) came in for some side-eye from Code censors, but the biggie was the nude swimming scene with O'Sullivan (actually her stunt double) and Weismuller (who kept his loincloth on). Only early theater audiences saw the original swim; a more modest version was substituted for later showings. The Netflix DVD we watched included the original version.

These…are not great movies. There’s a nostalgia factor in re-watching them. (I saw a lot as part of Saturday morning tv-watching growing up; it was cartoons in the early morning, then adventure and monster movies on the local channel in later morning.) With modern eyes, I can’t help noticing the many faults. Even overlooking the “of their time” ethnic stereotypes, the writing, acting, direction, etc. are, for the most part, pretty damn stiff and unimpressive. And there are a lot of plot elements recycled from movie to movie.

Some takeaways:

• The greatest dangers in the jungle are from stock footage
• Never trust a man with a thin mustache.
• If you’re an old man with a sense of decency, make sure your life insurance is paid up.
• Pretty sure Boy grew up to become The Professor on GILLIGAN’S ISLAND, where he recreated many of the devices in Tarzan’s treehouse.
• Where the hell did Tumbo go?
• Cheeta is an asshole.

(a somewhat shorter version of this piece first appeared as a comment at File 770)

Is The... *A* Future Finally Imminent?

Hilde and I were able to get Covid-19 vaccine shots recently. After spending the last year of our lives in mostly a holding pattern, we may finally be able to slowly begin resuming a more normal pattern of life.

April 8th will be two weeks after my second Pfizer shot, and I’ll feel (somewhat) more secure about adding more errands out to more locations more frequently. (Keeping trips outside the house to 1 or 2 a week for the last year has sometimes been a hassle.)

One of the first things to do is make an appointment for a new eye exam and new glasses. On Twitter and elsewhere, I've posted various eyepos I’ve made trying to read small print on my phone. From a few says ago: Misread someone tweeting “my bed covered with dice” as “my bed covered with lice”. Just a bit startling until I took a second, closer look.

(I actually had “new exam & glasses” on the post-retirement to-do list last March, but then the country began locking down just before I retired, and any non-essential appointments were pushed back. For a few months, he said, laughing weakly. I needed new glasses a year ago, and need them more now.)

Also going to try going to the gym every day if I can. And by “going to the gym” I mean walking to the EOS Fitness place that took over the old Safeway grocery's space last year, and walking back home again. (Nope, still not going to go inside any gym yet.) That’s about a 3-mile walk altogether, which maybe will help shed the ten pounds or so I’ve gained in the last year for some inexplicable reason.

(I felt kind of sorry for that EOS location. Their “grand opening” was in the middle of rising alarm about Covid-19, when people began avoiding gyms and fitness centers in droves. They were only open for in-person attendance for about a week before they had to close their doors and try to transition to online video classes for customers, for the duration of the lockdown. One of their ads during that increasingly dire week proclaimed “WE HAVE TOILET PAPER!”)

The local libraries have served as a good indicator of whether it’s safe to ease up on social restrictions. They were locked down for several months, with only curbside pickup. My local branch currently has a “mini-library” set up in one of their meeting rooms, with a smaller selection of the most popular books and DVDs on its shelves (you can request a hold for a title from the full inventory; patrons just can’t go browsing in the full public spaces yet).and with mask and social distancing guidelines enforced. Local politicians (rom city-level up to Arizona's dumbass governor Doug Ducey) are pushing for full re-opening, but librarians have been pushing back successfully so far.

I’ve only been back to the local library branch once in the past year, instead using Overdrive to borrow works (mostly audiobooks, and an occasional ebook) to sate my library jones instead. Miss being able to drop in and browse the shelves when I want, and especially the monthly meetings for the local writers workshop.

(After a few months off, the writers workshop moved to Zoom when it became clear the library meeting rooms we used wouldn’t be available again for a long… long… time. But it’s not quite the same as meeting in person.)

And of course my outside trips will still be masked and distanced. If Arizona gets down to zero Covid deaths for a week, I might (might) start thinking about the possibility of bare-faced gallivanting. Zero Covid hospitalizations, even better. Zero cases, best scenario of all.

But it looks like there's slow and mostly steady progress toward a post-Covid future. It would be even steadier if there was less masking-resistance, consistent social distancing, and end to anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, and fewer politicians trying to wish a post-Covid economy into being by lifting restrictions too early and too fully.

(a slightly different version of this piece first appeared as a comment on File 770)

From September 2020, when my
"Crazy Old Homeless Guy" quarantine-look
was at its peak.

My Writing 2020: Award Eligibility Post

So one of the things writers are supposed to do is publicize their work, and one of the ways to do that is to put a year-end roundup of published work on their website or blog.

I had two pieces of work published in 2020. The first, in January, appeared in online UK horror magazine DREAM OF SHADOWS. "Voices, In A Cedar-Scented Darkness" (short story, 1030 words) was available online for six months. DoS takes a year of stories published online between June and May and makes them available in a printed/ebook collection. The Dream of Shadows Monthly Stories for 2019-2020, including "Voices, In A Cedar-Scented Darkness", is available on Amazon; 99¢ for ebook, $3.99 for print.

My second published work for 2020 was "The Child-Eating Forest Speaks Its Mind", a long poem published in Liminality Magazine, Issue #26, Winter 2020-2021, just out a few days ago. I rarely take a stab at poetry, but this one worked out pretty well, I felt. I'm curious to see what kind of reaction it gets, so go ahead and take a look. (I've liked a good deal of the other poetry Liminality has published, too.)

Are either of these award quality? I'm prejudiced, but editors thought enough of them to purchase and publish them. Anything further depends on how many people actually read the story and poem, and what they think of them. (There usually isn't much feedback on short fiction or poetry, and even less when it gets published in small press venues. Good thing the main motivation for my writing is to satisfy myself.)

Review in Brief: MURDER IN THE NAVY by Ed McBain

I just finished reading an early (1955) Ed McBain novel (written as Richard Marsten), MURDER IN THE NAVY. Some nice noir elements (the naval officer hero drinks too much, has a cynical worldview, and has his quest complicated by superiors who want to sweep a murder under the rug).

But the main female character continuously places herself into risky or dangerous situations with a combination of naivete, foolishness, and just plain outright stupidity.

Add in the stereotype of Navy sailors who not only blatantly troll for sex, but succeed more often than not, and I was left rolling my eyes and feeling more than a little uncomfortable for reading the book.

Sadly (since I've enjoyed a number of McBain's 87th Precinct books), not recommended.

The "Hollywood" Ending, and a profound uneasiness

Having watched the "Hollywood" mini-series from Netflix, I came away being both very impressed by many aspects, but uncomfortable --very uncomfortable-- with how the series was concluded.

[MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD]

I watched "Hollywood" without having heard much about it. Caught a trailer, looked good, and How-Hollywood-Sausage-Gets-Made is one of my own interests, so went into it fairly cold, almost like catching a sneak preview of a film.

"Hollywood" is set in Post-WW2 Hollywood...but not quite. My first impression was that it was a story overlaying fictional characters, set in a fictional studio, onto actual Hollywood history. But then real people from Hollywood history (Rock Hudson and his agent Henry Wilson, in particular) entered the story line as prominent characters...

...and the story became an alternate history of Hollywood, rather than a fictional overlay. Or an uncomfortable mashup of both. (In real life, Hudson was first signed as a contract player by Universal, not the fictional Ace Studios depicted here.) Or something. I wasn't certain where the plot was heading.

[AGAIN, MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD. SPECIFIC PLOT POINTS! DETAILS! YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!]

Curt and the Green Penis

CurtStubbs passed away September 14, 2019. He’d been a friend to many, and to Hilde and me for over forty years. 

We didn’t see Curt as often after he moved to Tucson in the mid-1980s, but we always tried to have dinner with him at TusCon, the annual SF convention there. Curt struggled with a lot of health and financial issues through most of his life, but he seemed to have found a satisfying social niche in poetry, both his own and acting as a docent for the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona; he was also active in Tucson’s gay community. And he still enjoyed reading science fiction and attending an occasional convention. For years, he was the cook for the traditional Dead Dog Chile served on the last day of each year’s TusCon; there have been a lot of good bowls of chile served there over the years, but Curt’s (sorry, you later chile chefs) was the best.

When he was younger, and before some of his health issues surfaced, Curt tended to party hard. This led to some memorable anecdotes, and Curt’s fannish nickname of Captain Coors.

This is one of the stories from those early years:

---------

One morning, after a particularly hard night of partying and drinking, Curt woke up on the floor of the party apartment. He quickly realized two things:

• He wasn’t wearing any clothes, and,
• Sometime during the night, while Curt was unconscious, someone had decided to paint Curt’s penis green.

And then Curt looked at a clock, and realized a third thing:

• He had an important job interview scheduled for that morning, and there were less than twenty minutes before it was supposed to take place.

A moment of wild mental panic ensued: “My penis is green! Job interview! Green penis! Job interview!”

Curt had to make a choice. He found his scattered clothing, pulled pants on over his engreened penis, added shirt and shoes and a quick brush through his hair, and rushed out to make the job interview on time. Every minute on the way, the thoughts “I have a green penis. Someone painted my penis green. I have a green penis,” looped through his head.

Curt arrived to the interview on time, barely, still thinking “My penis is green. I have a green penis,” in the back of his mind

Somehow, he’s able to give coherent answers to the job interviewer. Things seem to be going well. But Curt’s mind is still repeating, “I have a green penis. I have a green penis. Oh, God-d-d-d-d-d, I have a green penis.”

“Well, that’s the end of the formal questions,” the interviewer finally says. He looks Curt straight in the eye, and asks:

“Is there anything else about yourself you’d like to tell us, Mr. Stubbs?”

Curt did not get the job.

ONE-BUCK BOOK REVIEW: This Strange Engine, by Philip Ligon

In the same vein as my occasional "The Brave Free Books", I'm hoping "One-Buck Book Review" will turn into an ongoing series reviewing books that I've bought for a dollar or less. A lot of these tend to be ebooks offered at 99 cents as a promotional sale, frequently for the first book in a series; I'll note the regular price when needed.

Fair warning: I try not to be overly negative, but when a book has flaws that lessen my reading experience, I'll point them out. (A lot of the 99-cent sales are from indie/self-published writers who tend to be at an early point in their writing careers. Sometimes this means their craft skills don't match up with their ambition or goals. Occupational hazard of writing.)

So, the first offering: THIS STRANGE ENGINE, by Philip Ligon. Ebook, regular price 3.99, I bought it on sale for 99 cents. Published by Silver Empire, 419 pages. Amazon link.

Steampunk fantasy mix. A portal to a fantasy world has introduced magic and magical creatures (elves, gnomes, cyclops, dragons, etc.) into Victorian England. Inevitably, some humans use the new resources and abilities to gather power and wealth for themselves. Ash, a disgraced cleric, is trapped under the thumb of the mysterious Misters, who coerce him into stealing magical objects. Aided by fellow friends in the criminal world (an invisible thief, a techno-gnome, and a barmaid with a hidden past). One of their opponents is Ash's ex-wife, who betrayed and tried to murder him, the start of the cascade failure that lead to his current dilemma and situation.

Adventures and disasters ensue. First in a series, this volume leaves many questions open, particularly regarding that portal to a fantasy world. I'll hazard a guess that in a later book, the portal will be traveled thru and adventures take place in the fae world.

All this is a good set-up, with a lot of possibilities. Unfortunately, two things kept me from enjoying the book as much as I had expected and hoped.

1) Ostensibly set in Victorian England, it felt very much set in the generic pseudo-England common to so very, very many fantasy novels. Steampunk, in my experience, usually offers stronger references to the history and culture of actual Victorian times. The "Victorian" details seemed scant and tacked onto the narrative.

2) My biggest problem, though, was Ash. He is one of the most whiny, self-pitying "Woe is me, my life sucks" characters I've ever encountered. Spending 400+ pages with the guy felt like a long slog through sad, depressed mud. I wanted to smack him upside the head and and say, "Your ex-wife has tried to KILL you. REPEATEDLY. Get a CLUE, you DUMBSHIT." (Note: Other characters give basically that same advice, over and over again, to Ash in the course of the book. To no avail.). It's only near the very end of the book that Ash finally gets a glimmer of self-realization and hope for himself.

The other characters were a lot more enjoyable. If the thief, the gnome, and the barmaid were to ditch loser Ash and go off on their own adventures, I'd probably read *that* book. They're kinda fun, aside from their inexplicable decisions to repeatedly stick by Ash.. But I'm reluctant to spend more time with Ash.

Overall impression: Interesting setup, but I felt the "Victorian" setting should have either been stronger, or simply go with the Standard Fantasy Setting it seemed to mostly be. Action scenes are well done. I felt making Ash such a completely miserable, self-loathing character was a poor choice.

Three out of five stars. I can see Philip Ligon set himself some ambitious goals for the story, but I came away feeling he didn't fully succeed.

Blast From The Past: 102 Great Novels, as of 1962-63

Among the papers of our friend Anne Braude, who passed away in 2009, I found a small pamphlet, a single folded sheet yellowed and brittle with age, that listed “102 Great Novels”. The pamphlet was distributed by the Scottsdale Public Library, and its list “COMPILED BY NELLENE SMITH, DIRECTOR”. Ms. Smith’s name dates the list to 1962 or 63 (thanks, Google!).

So, nearly sixty years ago, these were the books thought listing as “Great”. I thought it might be interesting to see how many still might be recognized as Great, or recognized at all after sixty years.

The list:

• A Death In The Family, Agee
• Moses, Asch
• Sense and Sensibility, Austen
• Pere Goriot, Balzac
• The Old Wives’ Tale, Bennett
• The Death of the Heart, Bowen
• Jane Eyre, Bronte
• Wuthering Heights, Bronte
• The Good Earth, Buck
• The Way of All Flesh, Butler
• Plague, Camus
• Death Comes For The Archbishop, Cather
• The Horse’s Mouth, Cary
• Don Quixote, Cervantes
• Greenwillow, Chute
• Lord Jim, Conrad
• The Just and the Unjust, Cozzens
• The Red Badge of Courage, Crane
• David Copperfield, Dickens
• U. S. A., Dos Passos
• The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky
• An American Tragedy, Dreiser
• Advise and Consent, Drury
• The Three Musketeers, Dumas
• Rebecca, du Maurier
• Justine, Durrell
• Middlemarch, Eliot
• Light In August, Faulkner
• The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald
• Madame Bovary, Flaubert
• A Passage To India, Forster
• The Forsythe Saga, Galsworthy
• The Cypresses Believe In God, Gironella
• Vein of Iron, Glasgow
• Dead Souls, Gogol
• I, Claudius, Graves
• Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hardy
• The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne
• The Old Man of the Sea, Hemingway
• The Wall, Hershey
• The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells
• Green Mansions, Hudson
• The Fox In the Attic, Hughes
• Les Miserables, Hugo
• Brave New World, Huxley
• The Wings of the Dove, James
• Ulysses, Joyce
• Trial, Kafka
• Zorba the Greek, Kazantzakis
• Darkness At Noon, Koestler
• The Leopard, Lampedusa
• Main Street, Lewis
• The Call of the Wild, London
• Epitaph For the Small Winner, Machado de Assis
• The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, McCullers
• The Watch That Ends the Night, McLennan
• The Magic Mountain, Mann
• Nectar In A Sieve, Markandaya
• Point of No Return, Marquand
• Of Human Bondage, Maugham
• Therese, Mauriac
• Moby Dick, Melville
• Gone With the Wind, Mitchell
• The Cruel Sea, Montsarrat
• Two Women, Moravia
• The Tale of the Genji, Murasaki
• Nineteen Eighty Four, Orwell
• Dr. Zhivago, Paternak
• Cry, The Beloved Country, Paton
• Ship of Fools, Porter
• The Man On A Donkey, Prescott
• Remembrance of Things Past, Proust
• All Quiet On the Western Front, Remarque
• The King Must Die, Renault
• The Trees, Richter
• Jean Christophe, Rolland
• Giants In the Earth, Rolvaag
• The Catcher In the Rye, Salinger
• The Human Comedy, Saroyan
• Ivanhoe, Scott
• Fontamara, Silone
• Strangers and Brothers, Snow
• The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck
• The Red and the Black, Stendahl
• Treasure Island, Stevenson
• The Travels of Jamie McPheeters, Taylor
• Vanity Fair, Thanckeray
• War and Peace, Tolstoy
• Barchester Towers, Trollope
• Dream of the Red Chamber, Tsao-Hsueh-Chin
• Torrents of Spring, Turgenev
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain
• Kristin Lavransdatter, Undset
• Candide, Voltaire
• The Egyptian, Waltari
• All The King’s Men, Warren
• Ethan Frome, Wharton
• The Once and Future King, White
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder
• Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe
• Memories of Hadrian, Yourcenar

The small pamphlet concludes with this statement from Nellene Smith: “There are so many fine novels that they all couldn’t be placed on a small list. However, I have presented a variety of classics and some works of contemporary authors whose writing is exceptional. –Nellene Smith”