Now that I’ve thoroughly dissected HP Lovecraft and CS Lewis, we will pivot this high caliber analytic cannon of a blog toward our next target; a comparison of the Star Wars and Marvel Superhero movies. The movies that Martin Scorcese pointedly described as “not cinema”, igniting a firestorm of publicity for the Marvel movies and whatever he was working on at the time, I don’t really remember, but I do remember my appreciation for the sheer snootiness of his comment, and I remember that he and some other directors were concerned about some gloriously worthless and unbelievably snooty cause, something about preserving old movies on original handcrafted plates or something, and someone from Empire magazine interviewed him about it and asked him what he thought of all the superhero movies, probably hoping to get some priceless comment in a comic book store guy voice, and that’s probably the only interview in Empire magazine that people like me will refer to for years to come. 

So are the Marvel movies “cinema”?  I have no idea because I don’t know what that means. Are they artistic? Are they literature? I don’t think so. 

I think the first Star Wars movie is artistic. I think Lucas created a new type of fantasy with it, a re-imagining of the fantasy genre by replacing the medieval outfits with California new age cult robes and replacing the horses with spaceships and laser swords. I don’t think he brought anything new to the sequels, and I think his weird desire to tell an anti-technology parable with movies that glorify a mix of technology and fantasy fatally interfered with his storytelling instincts. He stopped going for the 70’s realism vibe that mixed so interestingly with the fantastic elements in the first Star Wars, maybe I wonder responding to criticism from his pompous film school friends or, worse responding to praise from Joseph Campbell. He needed someone outside his circle to bounce ideas off, maybe. 

Of course I could clear my throat and point at yours truly now, but that would be tacky. We’re here to talk about George and how we could help him, or could have helped him in 1980, after Empire Strikes Back and before the Ewoks. Or maybe the Ewoks existed in his mind at the time and so many beautiful people had called him a genius to his face that he’d already lost it and he wanted to be mentally naked and bare his mind Ewoks and all on the big screen. 

So it’s 1980 and we’ve walked through a time portal with a message for Lucasfilm.  

It just so happens that in a previous post, we had a book, That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis,  from which we had removed the first six chapters or so, and were kind of left hanging there until now by, once again, Yours Truly. 

It’s all coming together now. The first two Star Wars movies - I’m not going to dignify that prequel Roman numeral crap with a turgid discussion of which came first - will take the place, in a multi-media format, in place of the removed chapters of That Hideous Strength. But whenever Obi Wan or Yoda talk about the force, they add a bit about the macrobes and how the leader of the bad macrobes on earth turned Darth Vader to evil. 

But what about Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra? Totally improved with a judicious injection of laser swords and Star destroyers. Ransom visits Mars with an earth colonial battle fleet, and foments an insurrection after connecting with a mystical guerilla leader named Oyarsa Malacandra, who teaches him the force and gifts him a sweet lightsaber to fight the earthling empire. 

It gets better in the new version of Perelandra. Ransom gets word that a new super Jedi lives on Venus, named Perelandra. She’s green skinned but human in form, kind of a mix of a Yoda and a human. She rides around the oceans of Venus on a floating vegetable mat powered by her force-magic at triple digit speeds. Ransom teaches her to channel her energy for righteousness, but the emperor lands on his personal shuttle and tries to woo her to the dark side. Surprise! She joins the Emperor and kills Ransom in a duel, after Ransom wounds the emperor, who falls in a Venusian lava flow. The green lady rescues the Emperor and he becomes Darth Vader. 

Here’s the twist in the third book, the evil green Sith replaces the Princess in the Star Wars chapters. 

Now get ready for awesomeness - in the Empire Strikes back she’s the one who trains Luke in the swamps of Venus, no Yoda, and after the big reveal of Luke’s father, we’re ready for part three with Jabba and the fight between the rebels and the empire on earth. 

We go Meta at that point: Darth Vader turns out to be George Lucas. He’s the president of several film conglomerates, and also President of the US, and Chief Justice and Speaker of the house, and Secretary General of the United Nations. He’s been making movies about his own interstellar empire! The audacity! 

I would wrap up both series with a double wedding of Luke, Han, and the Green Lady, with the audience slash reader still the only ones wise to her big secret. Sequel anyone? Yes, I believe I’ll have another slice -of both streams, please!

PS: I know we never included the superhero movies in our critical discussion - Sequel anyone?

How to RPG the CSL Space Trilogy

 I originally tried to begin this post with the words; “According to my rather indifferently performed internet research, this post will mark the first time a literary work is analyzed by being turned into a role play game,” but the fact that I hadn’t done any internet research at all began to bother me, so much so that I tried to actually do some research, and ended up getting a nasty shock when my first google search result returned a Wikipedia article on “LitRPG” which seemed to be an entire genre based on an idea that I had been congratulating myself for inventing. I did some reading and even found some fascinating sub-genres with Japanese names because they pertain to styles of manga. Eventually I concluded that LitRPG does not quite correspond to my idea but that my idea no longer afforded me any satisfaction and I did not feel like developing it in a post. 

It just doesn’t seem all that neat or original anymore. But anyway, while other people may have turned books into role play games, I would be willing to bet scads of money that no one else has ever even felt an inclination to turn this particular book, Out of the Silent Planet, by CS Lewis, into a role playing game. It would probably suck. The protagonist that you would play doesn’t really do anything adventurous in the book, and most of his character development is learning how awful modern earth civilization is and how much happier and more in touch with everything the primitive seeming martians are. 

So I figure that you would begin the game on the spaceship. You could play Ransom, Devine or Weston, but instead of strength or intelligence points I would give them Earth Pride Points and Understanding, or Ken points.  Their Ken points track how hip they are to what the martians, who are in a state of Grace, are laying down for their gross fallen earthly civilization type souls, and would help them develop their  EP score to 0, so that they are sufficiently ashamed of Earth by the end. Ransom would have a beginning Earth Pride score of 10 (out of possible 20 like DnD), but as a linguist he would have a Ken score of 15. Devine would be a 12 on EP and a 12 on Ken. Weston would be a 17 on EP but only a 10 on Ken. After his trip through the space, Ransom would get to remove one EP point. By the end of the story, when Ransom meets the God of Mars, his EP would be like 1, but Devine would be like 7 because of his low Ken. But Weston would still be at 14 or so on EP because his Ken is too low for EP lowering opportunities. 

You could make a better game out of the next book in the series, Perelandra, because in this book Ransom is already hip to how nasty earth is compared to the other planets but he’s a wimpy professor and has to fight the devil. So the big conflict is whether he can work up the courage to punch Weston, who is possessed by the devil. Also, there’s a Venusian Eve who has green skin and walks around naked, and Ransom has to maintain British indifference to her condition. These twin goals can complement each other by giving Ransom a capacity to transfer his sexual testosterone into violent testosterone. So every time he sees the naked green demigoddess he has to make a saving throw for his British indifference. If he succeeds on the throw he can transfer 1 point of sexual testosterone to his violent testosterone score. Then every time he sees the possessed Weston (who is also naked which probably helps with the BI) talking to his girl he rolls for indignation. The higher his violent testosterone, the better his advantage on these rolls. If he succeeds the indignation roll he can take a swing at the possessed old man.  At that point you can just play the game like a DnD battle.   Both of the pugilists are professors, so strength and constitution would be minimal, as would attack damage. 

I think we’ve made some good progress with the Space Trilogy, but unfortunately the last book in the series, That Hideous Strength, besides being mostly unbearable to read until the end, is also almost completely unplayable, like the dictionary or Doctor Dre (showing my age there). I honestly don’t know what to do with the third. It needs something. If I were a book doctor, I would prescribe radical multi-segment-otomy, the wholesale removal of the preliminary chapters. But we have no organic replacements for those chapters, unless we could draft some master writer, like Charlie Kaufman or Eminem, to provide us with some replacement chapters. But of course they’re busy, and we have a patient on the table with four or five chapters removed, cut open to their binding, desperately in need. We’ll have to provide something. If not a living transplant, a clumsy, crude prosthetic will have to do. 

Fortunately I happen to have crafted some in my spare time

CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft

Several years ago I purchased an odd book by CS Lewis called That Hideous Strength. I bought it because I had read the Narnia series and enjoyed most of them, and I’d read some of his pro-Christian work like The Great Divorce and the Screwtape Letters, and enjoyed them even though I had long ago stopped going to church or even caring about it and CS Lewis didn’t convince me because once you’ve read Carl Sagan, any Religious apologist just sounds like someone who hasn’t read Carl Sagan. I just realized that Carl Sagan’s initials are “C.S.” Just now, because I was deciding how to refer to CS Lewis. 

I bought it in spite of the hideous front cover illustration which reminds me, looking at it now, of the old English Sci-Fi TV shows like Doctor Who with the great ideas and the terrible special effects that the filmmakers know are terrible and they know you know so they kind of do symbolic special effects that are like signposts that say “this guy is supposed to be an alien, use your imagination and pretend he looks like one.” That’s the cover of That Hideous Strength, with the colored ribbons and what looks like a metal screw plate bracket of some kind hovering over picturesque college-type buildings and phantom chess pieces and and a poster on an easel. The bracket looked like one of those brackets where the screw holes make it look like a face but it’s really just a bracket, but after reading the book I realized it was a actually supposed to be a spirit face, which I liked, and thought it must be representing the devil, because metal bracket faces with screw holes certainly don’t look friendly. But now I’m thinking it might be representing god, who is kind of a super alien in the book. I did a google search to obtain the truth about the cover and failed, but I did get to see some other covers that have been published with the book over the years, some of which I liked better and some of which, unbelievably, I did not. 

Anyway, I purchased the book and eventually opened the book and read it in spite of the cover, and just as you might expect from the hideous cover and the terrible title (really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?), That Hideous Strength is mostly an unpleasant read. It covers a whole lot of academic politics stuff that almost nobody on Earth could find interesting, inner university doings that probably seemed important to CS Lewis and riled him up and comprised the emotional focus of a lot of his tea time musings but that I skimmed through with rising resentment and anger until I reached the interesting parts in the last few chapters. I would have given up on the book long before but I’d happened to read the author’s note, or the Author’s Lame Apology as I later referred to it, where CS admits that he purposely left the fantasy stuff out of the first part of the book on purpose because that’s the way old timey fairy stories used to be written but nobody notices because they use old timey words like “cottage” and “castle” that used to be normal everyday boring things but you young folk don’t get it because of TV. So after reading that intro I knew that something interesting might happen later, and it did, and it was interesting enough that I later purchased the other two books in the series, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, which I loved so much that I forgave CS for the first part of THS. 

I loved the other books because they’re fun and they don’t force the reader to endure multiple chapters of the most uninteresting college faculty in history, but also and mostly for Lewis’s big idea that makes it all worth it and makes you wish he’d not been such a subservient Christian with his stories and loosened up a bit with the Bible-validating that ruined a lot of his stuff. But back to the idea:

Any science fiction slash fantasy story needs one or more great, original, world changing ideas that makes the whole ridiculous and implausible storyline work, and the Space Trilogy, as I believe it is referred to by literary snobs, has the Macrobes, or the Eldils. I think he might have used “Macrobes” in THS, and only as spoken by Macphee, the terrific Scot Professor that made the book so much more bearable. (The only character in the book with an active heartbeat, as far as I could tell). The Eldils are superior alien beings, hyperdimensional energy creatures that Lewis takes great pains to make as non-humanoid as possible, and I found the idea of of angels (and also the gods of classical mythology) as alien superhuman energy beings (made of matter with ‘different movements’, as described in Out of the Silent Planet) to be a very fascinating idea, because it is also very terrifying. The terror makes the fascination. And Lewis seems to get that, because he describes something similar when he talks about the “numinous” in “The Problem of Pain”, the numinous being something that evokes awe and uncanny fear. But he also seems to kind of side step the truth about the feeling. In his passage describing “numinous”, he starts by referring to the fear a person feels when they hear there is a ghost in the next room. The “numinous” sensation is a magnified version of that fear, he describes it as the feeling you’d have if you heard it described as a “Great Spirit”, instead of just a ghost. Interestingly, he uses non-religious terms here to describe these feelings, which are instinctive, although he asserts that these are actually religious feelings. And this is one of those passages where you feel Lewis recoiling from his own mental imagery. Ghosts and spirits evoke uncanny fear in humans, but if you paste a religious doctrinal structure over them you remove the fear, and you also remove a lot of the fascination. Lewis does that with every vivid, spine-chilling, uncanny image he comes up with. So in the space trilogy, he says; “the angels are inhuman hyper dimensional energies, they are great spirits as far above you as you are from a mouse, these entities are also the beings that steer planets, they are called Eldils on other planets, where they rule alien creatures, but we have given them the names of gods. The greatest of them is called Maleldil, He’s a mysterious being with unimaginable...Don’t worry, he’s god. Just go to church”. Really? 

And that brings me full circle to HP Lovecraft, CS Lewis’s twisted American cousin (I can say full circle because I mentioned Lovecraft in the title, so don’t even comment on it. Please? Kidding, I really don’t care about commitment...I mean comments! That was autocorrect!). I could list all their similarities like you do with Lincoln and Kennedy, but I’ll leave that as a game for crazy people (hint: start with similarities in their names). I’ll summarize my opinion by saying that whereas CS Lewis, at his best, starts with an eery and compelling image in his mind and labors to describe it to you, and sometimes, unforgettably, succeeds, Lovecraft begins with an eery idea that he hints at, and never even tries to describe, leaving it entirely up to the reader’s mind to evoke. Because he knows that no monster could ever look as terrifying as his central tenet, the big truth of his writing; We are small, and the Universe is old and vast and unfriendly. 

If Lovecraft had written the Space Trilogy, you wouldn’t get the marvelous images that Lewis conjures, and Maleldil would not end up as a Sunday school story. Ransom might survive Out of the Silent Planet with sanity intact, but he would have been a shattered, neurotic mess in the Perelandra, which would have ended with the Un-man in charge of the planet, or possessing the Queen. The creatures of Malacandra might look like Lewis imagined, but they wouldn’t be boring noble savages anymore, and the book would most certainly end with a ghastly sacrifice that the reader would hear about second hand, because of course, it would destroy the sanity of the narrator to describe it. Interestingly, Lewis does describe, vividly of course, a rather horrible possession in the next novel, by no less than the devil himself. But here’s the difference; In Lovecraft’s universe, there’s no god above the devil, refereeing the story and making sure it all ends okay. Lewis makes it clear that his “dark lord” is a rebel against the just and all-powerful Maleldil/God. Lovecraftian gods are completely opaque if not malevolent. We would never know if one was rebelling against the other, and all their actions would appear inscrutably horrifying to the narrator. 

I would enjoy reading Lovecraft’s version of the Space Trilogy, but after I started writing this post, I of course decided to re-read the Space Trilogy, and I realized that it was possible that Lewis might have read Lovecraft, and that his Space Trilogy might be seen as a reply to Lovecraft, a Christian mashup of the Chronicles of Narnia and the call of Cthulhu. He describes very inhuman, hyper-dimensional entities with vastly superior intelligence to ours, and describes alien creatures and landscapes. But every time his protagonist, Ransom, experiences a pseudo-lovecraftian horror to the aliens, it’s analyzed and dismissed as a parochial, simple-minded response by Ransom, and 

he suddenly sees the reality of the alien creatures as beautiful in their own way. 

Lovecraft says “we are small, the universe is vast and horrible and malevolent.”

Lewis replies “Its okay to be small, God’s in charge and he’ll take care of you. The universe is a big beautiful garden of wonder”. 

Lovecraft never got a chance to reply. He died under fairly miserable conditions before the space trilogy was published. I would feel sorry for him, but he said a lot of awful racist things in his lifetime, and fully believed what he said. But he was also miserable and crazy and pathetic. Lewis actually might have been somewhat racist too, actually. He was a friend of Tolkien.  But more later... writing in blogger on an iPad is inscrutably unpleasant