So I’m reading — for the seventh or eighth time–Robert Heinlein’s Friday. I’ve reviewed it before, 13 years gone. This time, I’m struck by some of the events portrayed against the background of a pseudo-dystopian future. They’re all too… familiar to a reader in 2025 America.
Heinlein was a very perceptive social critic. He could see past the conventional wisdom of the times he was living in and caught some trends and developments most people didn’t. That vision made him fairly prophetic. In Friday, he predicted multinational corporations taking ownership of whole countries and becoming nations themselves. Surely as American billionaires have re-launched the space race, once the province of nation states only, we can see that next step as plausible.
So last week I told a wildly slanted version of the story of Oedipus, the man who had a complex named for him long before we started naming complexes for banks and telecomms.
As you’ve guessed if you’ve read my blistering attack on the tale of the man who killed his father and married his mother, I don’t go looking for reasons to talk about Oedipus. I try not to think about him, because, “Eew.” But I recently read a book called The Wisdom of the Myths by a philosopher named Luc Ferry. Mr. Ferry’s goal was nothing less than to bring us better living through mythology. He dug into the philosophical underpinnings of the stories that, to the rest of us, are fodder for Disney movies and Ray Harryhausen films; and he came up with some advice for living.
His main point was that the ancient Greeks accepted man’s mortality in a way no cultures did. They didn’t really believe in an afterlife. People just died. Oh, yeah, their shades (ghosts) went to the Underworld, ruled by Hades. But as soon as Charon the ferryman rowed them across the River Styx, they drank from the River Lethe and they forgot who they were. And then they just sort of… milled about down there. Like the opening chapter of The Wizard of Oz, everything was just gray. (I in no way mean to imply that Kansas is Hell. Superman comes from Kansas, and I refuse to insult Superman.)
A few special souls got to live in the Elysian Fields. Sort of the upper floors of Hades, where you have to have a room key to make the elevators go there. Presumably these souls remember their lives, and thus achieve immortality. But they are special. The world of the Greek myths was elitist above all. There were also other special souls who remembered very well who they were: Sisyphus, Tantalus, Ixion… The people–kings all–who pissed off the gods and were tortured for eternity.
Oh, and one or two mortals got made into gods. And a few got plastered into the heavens as constellations. The stories never weighed in on whether, as constellations, they were self-aware and had memories. I sense not.
Mostly, though, the ancient Greeks believed you got one life, you died, and that was that. No mystical path to immortality. Mr. Ferry finds in this advice for us all: stop trying to bribe the gods into letting you have more life. Accept that one life is what you get, and make the most of it.
Oedipus did nothing wrong. This must be distinctly understood, or else the wondrous snark I shall direct at this story may never be appreciated. (The Dickens you say.)
It all starts with Oedipus’s birth father, Laius, eventually King of Thebes. Laius’s father, a grandson of Thebes’s founder, Cadmus, died while Laius was a child. The throne was seized by usurpers, and little Laius was unfortunately smuggled out of the city before he could be executed by the new administration. I say “unfortunately,” because no good came from Laius. Literally everyone he touched died tragically.
Laius grew up in Pisa, the ward of King Pelops. Pelops no doubt had sympathy for a child who had escaped execution because, well, Pelops hadn’t. Pelops had been murdered and butchered into stew meat as a child, by his own father, who wanted to impress some important dinner guests. (Okay, they were the gods of Olympus.) His guests were not impressed. They restored little Pelops to life so he could become Poseidon the sea god’s lover (you can’t make this shit up, even though someone probably did). Pelops led a charmed life which culminated in his becoming a king. Then he welcomed The Omen into his house.
Note: This is really long, comparatively, and contains spoilers for a film you’ve had 40 years to see. I apologize for nothing.
Before I get to discussing the film, a brief, perhaps self-serving anecdote:
I was performing, onstage at the Farpoint convention, with my group, Prometheus Radio Theatre. Lance Woods and I were playing Jim Kirk and Spock, as if they were roles essayed by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in a (fictional) 1940s film called The Road to Orion. I was very proud of my script, and we had a great time with a lot of celebrity guests and in-jokes for the audience.
In that audience was one James Callis, star of Battlestar Galactica and the Bridget Jones films. Mr. Callis had been invited to perform, had declined, but had stayed to watch. After the show, his agent told me that he had spent the performance pointing wistfully at the stage and saying, “But I want to do that!”
Told you it was self-serving.
I can think of few forms of praise higher than being told that your work makes someone else say, “I want to do that!” When I first saw Richard Donner’s Ladyhawke, in 1985, it had that effect on me. I saw on the screen a story I desperately wished I could have told. And I promptly forgot that, and spent the ensuring years thinking of the film only when engaged in arguments about its soundtrack. (Best. Soundtrack. Ever. Fight me.)
I couldn’t find the preview flier I first saw, but pretty sure this was the image.
But this past Friday, wanting to kick back and watch TV, my wife Renee and I chose Ladyhawke over all the newer content on our streaming services, probably because of the sheer novelty of seeing it show up on the top of Prime’s recommended content list.
I just read Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. I’m a science fiction fan and a recovering children’s librarian. This book was already a classic of young adult literature by the time I was of age to read such things. A good friend of mine told me over thirty years ago that it was the best book ever written, and I just had to read it.
So I finally did.
Trigger Warning: Blasphemy.
It bored me. Worse than that, it irritated me.
I will not go into the details of why it bored an irritated me. It’s a respected book which has literally changed lives. My failure to appreciate it is my own failing, not Ms. L’Engle’s.
We all have faults. I reserve the right to have angst about mine, and to take that angst out and fuss with it when I should be doing more productive things.
In the course of fussing, I asked an old friend if she had read the book. This is one of the three or four friends (in S.F. fandom no less!) with whom I still discuss books. She introduced me to Robert Heinlein’s work, back when we were both larval. I thought she would offer a reasoned argument to instill an appreciation for this noted work. I don’t want to be a blasphemer, after all. Blasphemers are broken on the wheel, burned at the stake, or at the very least not invited to respectable dinner parties.
I was not planning to review this book. I have read it countless times. Recently, when my grandson asked me to name my favorite book, I named two: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (to give him a more-accessible reference, as I suspected that my answer was going to make it back to a teacher who was not born when Robert Heinlein died) and The Number of the Beast.
“It is not Heinlein’s best work!” is the most generous thing most readers say about it. I don’t claim that it is. I can’t begin to develop the criteria by which I would rank the “best” book by an author who defined a genre and continues to entertain readers 35 years after his own death. I merely state that it is my favorite of his books, one which I, in the words of the book itself, “reread for pleasure when [I am] too tired to tackle a new book.” Reviewing such a book would be the equivalent of writing about eating a Zero Bar or drinking a bottle of cream soda.
Why, then, am I writing? I am writing because last night, amidst the sadness of closing the cover on page 511 of the beautiful trade paperback edition I’ve owned since Christmas, 1981[1], I went down the rabbit hole of reading the book’s reviews on Goodreads. The one-star reviews did not rattle me. They are, as always, largely reviews of the author, not the book, with all the expected buzzwords: Self-indulgent, narcissistic, homophobic, misogynist. They also include a handful of tasteless references to the fact that Heinlein wrote the book’s first draft[2] while suffering an oxygen-depriving brain disorder, with the suggestion that such explains the book’s poor quality. There are also wild speculations about how “Heinlein’s editor” “allowed” this book to be published. (In fact, he put it out for bid and there was competition. And the version that was published was heavily re-written following a successful surgery which restored his mental and physical health.)
So, right up front, there’s some doubt about the name of this story. It is consistently called “The Hell-Bound Train” wherever mentioned in The Hugo Winners, Volume I. Wikipedia credits it as “That Hell-Bound Train,” matching the folksong from which it takes its name. Isfbd.org agrees with Wikipedia.
Robert Bloch is perhaps best known as the author of Psycho, the novel on which Alfred Hitchcock’s famous thriller of the same name was based, and of Psycho II, the novel on which Richard Franklin’s less-famous thriller of the same name was… not based.
Bloch’s work nearly always includes elements of horror, but he is known for science fiction stories as well, including the Star Trek episodes“Wolf in the Fold,” about Jack the Ripper, “Catspaw,” about the fabled civilization whose science is so advanced that it is indistinguishable from magic, and “What Are Little Girls Made of?”, about the killer androids created by a dread (and dead) civilization.
No surprise, then, that his first-and-only Hugo-winning short is not really a science fiction story, but a variation on Faust and many other tales of mortals trying to outwit the devil.
The other day, I talked about why I don’t like fiction in the fantasy genre. I admitted that I was using a rather specific definition of fantasy, and I went over a specific example of a fantasy story that didn’t work for me.
So what does work for me? I would say that I’m capable of enjoying any successful piece of fiction. Ah… but what is “successful fiction,” and how does one know if one’s creating it?
Writing successful Fiction comes down to the question of “What’s in it for me?” “Me,” in this case, being the reader.
Or so I believe. I wouldn’t trust me, as it’s quite arguable whether or not I’ve ever written a piece of successful fiction.
(Or…Why I Don’t Like Fantasy, Explained, Part One)
I don’t like fantasy.
“But all fiction is fantasy… waaaaaah…”
Stop that. You know what I mean. Well, maybe you don’t. I know what I mean.
I mean Tolkein. Conan the Barbarian. Shanara. Xanth. Hell, I have trouble getting into Heinlein’s Glory Road, although I’ve read it three times. All good works, but I don’t like their flavor. Except Glory Road. (What is “Fantasy?” Stay tuned next week.) For whatever reason, I’ve just never cared for fantasy.
So, when I sat down to read the latest entry in Isaac Asimov’s The Hugo Winners and realized it was largely fantasy, I read with an extra critical eye. As a result, I gained some insights about what elements fantasy as a genre often contains—or does not contain—that make it a problem for me.
This week, while working on a blog post about Scottish politics (not kidding—just got back from Scotland and was fascinated by some comments made by an excellent tour guide),
I decided to take a detour into nostalgia. I quaffed down a Slurpee and inhaled a couple cans of Pringles and re-read a favorite comic book. Okay, I read a comic book. The other stuff will stay a pleasant memory, because, while 11-year-old me had the metabolism of a blast furnace, 57-year-old me gains eight ounces just by typing the words “Cheese Waffles.”
I’ve read this issue probably a hundred times—99 of them, sadly, before I was 15, and the last this week. From the depths of a long box in my office, it’s been calling to me, “Please read me again!” Finally, I did. Why that particular comic called out to me, I’ll get into at the end.
