Four Good and Different Stories -- Book Review of The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century

Photo: from Random House's website, here.

Very entertaining collection of 14 stories that offer a different view of history, or a view of a history yet to come. Though I found 2 or 3 of them to be clunkers, the others are more than worth your while.

My preferred ones, in no particular order, are:

In "The Lucky Strike," the pilot of the Enola Gay does not drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though the U.S. government uses his punishment to send a message, a new feeling of hope and peace arise, and the bomb never has to be dropped at all. This Kim Stanley Robinson tale is rightly popular in the genre, and constantly referenced.

Ward Moore's "Bring the Jubilee" is more a novella, but it reads as quickly as a short story. The historical change here is at the end, and almost an afterthought, as it takes up about 2% of the story time. Instead we get a very well-written and engrossing take on what America would be like today if the South had won the Civil War, but it doesn't bog itself down with politics and stereotypes. In our current political climate, this is a welcome change. Very well-constructed story with believable characters. This one is considered a masterpiece of the field.

"Dance Band on the Titanic" is an interesting little story that will stayed with me afterwards, more for the thoughts the story inspires than for the story itself. It's about a loner who works on a ferry that carries passengers and products over several time rifts, several alternate realities and possible some parallel universes. Throws it all in there. The core of it is a girl who commits suicide many times over, in the same way. But many times, because there are many of her in all of the alternate and parallel realities. But if he's able to talk her out of it, all of the "hers" will not do it, as well. Rather well carried out, but I laid on my bed last Saturday, ready to write a short story that I thought would be better. I stopped writing 6 hours later, and I found I had a new novel on my hands! That's how a lot of my ideas come, which is why writers say you should read a lot if you want to write. You'll see something you like, but you think could be better, and then you try to do it. I've never written in this genre before, and I was actually in the middle of two other novels when this one hit. But I'll finish this one first.

"The Death of Captain Future" is a really good short story. It's not alternate future fiction as I understand it, because it all takes place in the future, and there's no history or time change in it. A little confused about why it's in this collection, actually...But it's a good story that's more about heroism and courage (and spin) than anything else. The female character in it looks and talks and acts like a female character in one of my short stories, written months ago, long before I knew this story existed, that I'm also making into a novel. So I wasn't happy to see that...

These are my four favorites. A few others were good, but not worthy of review here, and, like I said, two of them I thought were clunkers. A couple others were...meh. One story was about Shakespeare hitching aboard a ship that lands in present-day Virginia. His crewmates get killed, but he's so entertaining that he's allowed to live. Because of his stagework, he's a good fighter with a pole, too. He writes Hamlet, but the tribe laughs at it...Meh.

In another one, time and history get severely screwed up, as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and Mozart and a general for Genghis Khan are all thrown together. Good story, actually, but really out there, which is the whole point of the story. I could've given this one more review time.

There's a long one, the last one, in which Hitler comes up with the bomb just before America does, and so there's a stalemate and Germany is allowed to move on. Hitler lives a lot longer, as does Goebbels, who tells the story. Hard to get through; difficult because both are so correctly reviled. Meh.

In another one, a good one, two Nazis stop at a cottage because they're lost. A witch / crone tells them their unfortunate future. One almost shoots her but thinks better of it. Popular story in the genre. I could've covered it more, but it's mostly allegorical, rather than a story. Still good, though.

Another good one, very short, is about a guy who realizes suddenly all of the "hims" that exist in all of the alternate and parallel realities, and it drives the story's "him" into suicide. Not all of the "hims," though. I'm torn about it. Interesting concept and understandable conclusion, but I still feel it was bungled. Good / meh.

But get this book to at least read the four I described above. Or find them somewhere and read them. Well worth it. Enjoy!

Book Review: Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate

Photo: Book's cover (and the Chiandros portrait) from mathomhouse.typepad.com.

Mostly-fascinating collection of essays, thoughts, theories and placing-you-there Elizabethan history that attempts to understand nothing less than the very mind of Shakespeare, as a man of his time, and--as Ben Jonson famously wrote--as a man "not of an age, but for all time."  Besides a couple of chapters about the politics and religion of his time that I found a bit too dry, the book succeeds at doing so.  It is at its best when it sticks to the literary and theatrical stuff: his plays, his theatres and the people he knew.  If anyone doubts the existence of a non-university man who got a woman eight years his elder pregnant, married her, and left them behind to find his glory and future in the theatres of London, England, let them read this, and they will doubt no more.

This book brings Shakespeare to life like few things I have read.  Michael Wood's book and a couple of others are just as good, in different ways.  And they all delve into the man and his time using their own conceits.  The conceit of this one is to break the book down into sections that correspond to Shakespeare's famous "Seven Stages of Man" speech from As You Like It.  (This is the one that begins with the even-more-famous line, "All the world's a stage.")  And so Bate chronicles the life of and mind of Shakespeare by breaking his life up into the seven parts that we all supposedly share.  I got the feeling that Bate had much of the book written already, via separate speeches and chapters, and tied them all together with the conceit of the seven stages, but whatever.  It doesn't matter, because it works.

The narrative is at its best when it brings us pell-mell into Elizabethan England.  We see it as Shakespeare may have, and we witness things, and become aware of city-wide and nation-wide news that he would have been aware of.  We meet the Burbages, and Heminges, and Condell, and the theatre and publishing climates of the time.  We see him as one of the many in these realms, and as one in the businesses he was in.  He is placed firmly in his time, and yet the book works well also when it shows him to be a chronicler of his time.  Shakespeare is renowned as being perhaps not just the best writer of our times, but also as the best mirror to his own time, without blocking the visage with his own image.  He is within his world, and yet surprisingly intellectually and philosophically detached from it, so he can show it to us, and paint a picture of our human nature, and yet not include his own views and preferences in it--all at the same time.

In short, we know what Hamlet thinks--but we never know what Shakespeare thinks.  Of course, no writer is his character, and no character is its author.  We know all of one, and very little about the internalization of the other.

But Bate's book gets us closer to it than perhaps anything I've read before.  The best compliment I'd give to this book is that it shows you something different about Shakespeare and his England, even if you thought you'd read it all before, like I have.  If you enjoy that kind of literary history, and a biography of him (a little) and of his time, and of his place in his time (a lot of that), then you'll enjoy this.

Shakespeare Had No Part in the Publication of His 1609 Sonnets

Photo: Title page of the 1609 Sonnets, from its Wikipedia page.

Clinton Heylin's So Long As Men Can Breathe: The Untold Story of Shakespeare's Sonnets is a very quick and interesting read about Shakespeare's unauthorized (according to the author--and I agree with him) 1609 Sonnets.  He deals with the times very well, and with the publishers, printers and other authors of the time, too.  He tackles a lot of issues, a lot of theories, and a lot of the works of other critics, both old and current (including current literary critic Katherine Duncan-Jones, who he criticizes so brusquely, so often, and with such glee, that it seems personal), and does so with a breezy writing style and a lot of his own research and proof.  He writes more about how many critics are wrong about something (especially the fore-mentioned Duncan-Jones) than he does about what he's right about, but finally he takes a stand about why he thinks Shakespeare played no part in the publication of his sonnets in 1609. 

I don't like the method in which he does this, however.  He essentially summarizes the thoughts about a topic, then writes about what literary critics throughout the ages have written about that topic, then writes about why he thinks they're wrong about what they've written (again, especially Duncan-Jones, who he really seems to dislike personally), and then--and only then--writes about what he believes is correct, and why.

However, at that point, he states his case well, and the reader has a thorough understanding of the idea, the history of the idea, all the people surrounding that idea, what the critics have written about that idea, and finally what he thinks about that idea.  When you're done, you feel as if you've learned something, and you feel like you've just read from an authority, which I suppose you have.

And so to take it from there, listed below are my reasons for why I believe Shakespeare had no part in the 1609 publication of his sonnets.  If I can toot my own horn here a moment, I'll point out that I wrote all of these down after I read up to page 91, and that Heylin only writes about a couple of them.  The rest--for better or for worse--are all mine.

I believe that Shakespeare did not approve of, or participate in, the publication of his Sonnets because:

--He was in semi-retirement by 1609, rather late in the game to publish a book of sonnets.  Such a thing would've been done to jump-start a career at that time, not end one.  Shakespeare would be fully retired just four years after its publication.  He'd be dead within seven years of its publication.

--The sonnet fad had petered out in London by the late-1590s.  Shakespeare was a follower of fads; his thumb was very much on the pulse of his public.  He would not have published something a decade out of fashion.  If he'd wanted them published at all, he would have published all 154 of them by 1595.

--By the end of the 154 sonnets, he was clearly tired of them as a mode of expression.  Shakespeare was forever changing his writing styles, so much so that by 1609, his Problem Plays showed a roving creative mind that was at odds as to how it wanted to express itself.  By 1609, Tempest-time, he was WAY over the sonnets as a mode of expression.

--Though he embedded sonnets into his plays throughout his career, he last used them in his plays with seriousness of presentation in Romeo and Juliet, in roughly 1593.

--The Sonnets have a very (infamously) questionable Dedication that speaks more of its publisher and procurer than it does of its writer.  Or of Pembroke, or of Wriothesley, or of whomever.

--By 1609, the leading dramatist of London, a part-owner of the Globe, a very wealthy man and a very esteemed Gentleman, owner of two huge homes and two large tracts of land, and the favorite of all of the King's Men to the King himself, had no need at all of a sponsor, of an Earl of Anything, to support him, or to sponsor his writings.  But he would have in 1593, though not any later than that.  And he would not finish writing something by 1595 and wait until 1609 to publish them--if he wanted to publish them at all.

--In 1593, sonnets were hot; in 1609, they were not.  Shakespeare, who was very good at making money, at striking while the iron was hot, would've published all 154 of his sonnets--if he'd wanted to publish them at all--by 1595, in order to make as much money as possible from them.  Though a huge name by 1609, his sonnets would not have been, and indeed were not, a bestseller.  He would know that.  Though not one to turn away from money, he would not have needed it badly enough by 1609 to publish these sonnets.  But Thomas Thorpe was that desperately in need.  How did he procure these sonnets if Shakespeare didn't give them to him?  Nobody knows.  But they did not know each other well.  Thorpe was not amongst his friends.

--We're taught that the Sonnets, when combined, create a storyline created by three large groupings of them.  An older, wiser man urges a younger man, whom he obviously loves, and fantasizes about, and whom he is possibly having a relationship with, to procreate so that he can live forever (though the narrator insists that his art of writing will do this for the younger man as well); a convoluted affair between the younger man, the narrator, and a "dark lady," creates anguish for the narrator; the "dark lady" and the younger man leave the narrator stewing in his own bitterness and lust.

This is actually not the case.  There's no connected storyline here.  The three groupings are not seamlessly connected.  In fact, quite often, back-to-back sonnets are not connected.  Shakespeare would not have published them like this, in these groupings.  They are three distinct groups, one not having to do with the other.  And I'm not even convinced that there are three groupings here.  I'd bet that Thorpe put this together more than I would that Shakespeare did.

--Sonnets 1-17 strike me as a group of sonnets that a 1590s Shakespeare would have been hired to write so that whomever hired him could deliver them to the Earl of Pembroke, who slept around a lot, never wanted to marry, ignored his Queen's urging to marry specific women, who was apparently super-handsome and beloved by all (if you know what I'm sayin') and who finally married, though not happily, nor exclusively, by 1608.  It was a common practice for writers to get paid to write such things, as well as elegies, eulogies, songs for others' plays, etc.

--Shakespeare was also not one to beat a dead horse, or to repeat something over and over without even the slightest of thematic change.  Yet all sonnets 1-17 say is: "Give birth so you don't die," and nothing more.

--Shakespeare was a hugely profitable and popular writer by 1609.  He would not have given any writing to Thomas Thorpe, who already had one foot in bankruptcy and the other in ineptitude.  His writing would've gone to the best publisher and bookseller (as one was commonly both) in London.

--The Sonnets are infamously uneven.  Some are eternal masterpieces.  But #145 is clearly an earlier sophomoric, badly-conceived, melodramatic, juvenile effort, probably written for Anne Hathaway (as her name is punned within it) before they were married, when Shakespeare was about 19.  By 1609, at age 45, he would have blanched to see it in print, for all of super-critical London to see.  This would be like me seeing my high school stories in print.

--The Sonnets, as I mentioned, do not have an arrangement that Shakespeare would have devised.  The last two sonnets, called the "Cupid Sonnets," have nothing at all to do with the previous 152 sonnets.  Numbers 29 and 30 are clearly companion pieces, mirror-images of each other.  But #129 is a bitter and violent purge of self-hatred and regret, about a narrator who lusts uncontrollably for a "dark lady," and is in a self-created Hell because of it.  #130 is an amusing over-exaggeration of a woman's physical imperfections, too numerous to be taken seriously, the point being that their love is special because it's not based on a superficial physicality.  In other words, there's no lust involved.  These simply do not go together.  The genius who intertwined the complexities of the double-plot of King Lear, and who combined pitch-perfect self-examination with a revenge plot in Hamlet, did not put these sonnets together.

--#126, alone of all 154, are six pairs of rhyming couplets--12 lines, not 14--and therefore also does not have the same rhyme scheme as the others.  It's a well-written experiment, not meant to be included with all the rest.  #99 has 15 lines, not 14, as line 5 is extraneous.  Further proof that the Sonnets were published without Shakespeare's supervision--and certainly without his approval.

These are the reasons why I believe that Shakespeare played no part in the 1609 publication of his sonnets.

Quick Jots

I completed a rough sketch of the three acts of The Gravediggers, and have been working hard at just writing, and not thinking too much.  Thinking too much, researching too much--such things are purposeful distractions and resistances.  So I've just been writing--chapters, fragments, sketches, etc.  But you need to structure all that sometime, so that's what I've done today, after celebrating Mother's Day with my better half and her mother.

I started reading Geraldine Brooks's Year of Wonders, about Eyam and the Plague.  I wanted to see what she famously did there, so I didn't do badly what she's already done so well.  The writing is exceptional, though a little Hallmark Hall of Fame for me.  But she deserves her accolades, and her work with the Wall Street Journal certainly earned her the Pulitzer.

I've surprised myself by not downloading and using the Dragon voice software.  So far, haven't needed it.  But I know where in this work, and in other things, I will.

I've tidied up the office a bit, bringing some stuff to redeem at Newbury Comics (for $12, not bad) and brought the rest to Salvation Army.  I've decided to bring many of my books to my workplace and store them there, sort of start a decent-sized library.  That'll clear up a lot of space in the office, as will donating the bed.

Writers write.  So far I'm still plugging away.  This work hasn't been as easy as Cursing the Darkness was.  Then again, none of them have been since.  But I'm told they're much better.

"Hurly Gurdy Man" sounds creepy as hell to me.  I can't use it in the book, of course, but it always brings up dark images for me that will go into the book.  Hard to believe it's a flower power song.  I like the verse that George Harrison supposedly offered, which were never put into the official song:

When the truth gets buried deep
Beneath a thousand years sleep
Time demands a turnaround
And once again the truth is found...

Now that ain't flower power.  Another stanza that isn't, that is in the song:

Histories of ages past
Unenlightened shadows cast
Down through all eternity
The crying of humanity

'Tis then when the hurdy gurdy man
Comes singing songs of love
Then when the hurdy gurdy man
Comes singing songs of love...

My question is this: When we're at our weakest, our most defenseless, how do we know those "songs" are truly of love?  What if the hurdy gurdy man was as Hamlet's thought of his father's ghost, a demon in disguise, using our sadness against us to damn us?

That's a writer's mind at work.  Yup, that's how I roll.

Funeral

Funeral today.  Took several days off trying to just make it through.  I will be back to life as I know it, as I can best make it, by the next entry.  I normally keep all things personal out of my blogs, but felt a bend in the rules necessary in this case.

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

--Hamlet, Act I, Scene ii.