The Last Kingdom has come to an end. I watched nearly all of it and enjoyed nearly all of what I watched. But by the third season I was already aware that it was a kind of modular story, constructed from parts that would show up again and again, reused in new configurations:
Danes invade Saxon lands
The Danish leader, like a James Bond villain’s henchman, has some eccentricity of costume or behaviour
Uhtred is tempted to join his Danish friends
A Saxon nobleman is scheming for his own benefit and to the detriment of the kingdom
The King of Wessex is being unreasonable and listening to bad advice
Uhtred expresses anti-clerical views, but there is a specific priest (or even several) whom he admires
Uhtred does something of which the Saxons disapprove
The King of Wessex banishes Uhtred
Uhtred, though an outlaw, resolves to save the Saxons
Uhtred convinces the King of Wessex to redeem himself
Uhtred, through clever tricks, wins a battle and saves the Saxons
Drop a comment if I missed any.
(Spoilers Below)
But The Last Kingdom was a good show. In between these reusable blocks there was much material that did not fit this repetitive pattern, such as Breda acting as a foil to Uhtred, diverging ever-further from him and from his Saxon friends. With each turn of the wheel her actions grew more extreme until suddenly she was up in Iceland doing throat-singing and human sacrifices.
We could make similar points about several other characters, such as Aethelfaed and Aelswith, real multi-dimensional personalities. The women characters in particular got to operate autonomously from the repeating story blocks and the elements of ‘stock character’ which this imposed on Uhtred, the King, the Scheming Nobleman, the Big Bad Dane, the Good Priest and the Bad Priest. And often the Stock Characters and modular blocks were executed so well it was difficult to be bothered by the repetition.
The Last Kingdom has come to an end with a movie, Seven Kings Must Die, in which most of these blocks of story got one last airing. I can’t deny I felt something stir in me when Uhtred finally saw Valhalla with his dying eyes. For five seasons and a movie he has been torn between Saxon and Danish worlds. He always came down on the Saxon side, but in death he finally gets to drink and boast with long-dead comrades and enemies. But of the faces laughing around the eternal mead-table, I could only definitively put a name to one (Breda, naturally).
I was struck, in Seven Kings, by the drabness of the world of this story. Maybe this is because I was watching The Last Kingdom at movie length, or maybe it’s because I recently saw the samurai epic Ran, which is awash in colour. Uhtred’s Anglo-Saxon England is all greys and browns in a murky filter. Some people on the internet who want to ‘RETVRN’ to back-breaking agricultural toil (of the feudal and not the gulag variety) think there’s a screen conspiracy to make the Middle Ages look bad by suppressing the colours. I don’t buy the conspiracy angle. Creators and audiences feel that bright colours are tacky and cheesy. Indeed, Ran is brilliant but some of the costumes do look synthetic. Organic colours and non-plasticky textures feel more authentic. Whether they are or not, I don’t know, but they are certainly a cheap and easy way to make things feel authentic. Maybe this shortcut to ‘authenticity’ has run its course culturally.
Seven Kings ended with a great battle scene, but some damage was done by the scenes immediately preceding the clash. It was not clear who was where, how many soldiers they had, or where those soldiers came from. A little more care here would have gone a long way.
The worst thing you could say about The Last Kingdom is that it was a bit boring at times, especially in the last two seasons. That’s where I skipped a few episodes. My loss of interest, I think, was due to the repetition. They filmed it all in a replica medieval village in Hungary, and it was obvious that one ‘town square’ location filled in for multiple towns. By about Season Four the viewer is too familiar with these interiors and exteriors – not the comfortable and evocative familiarity of a definite location which we know well, but the tiresome familiarity of the same kinds of places filling in for the same kinds of places. The interchangeableness of locations mirrored the interchangeableness of story elements, and both undercut the best efforts of writers, crew and cast to make each season fresh and exciting.
The first season was definitely the best – the set-up for the whole show is great, and early on the elements of repetition have not yet set in. The other seasons had great high points – the attack on Dunholm, or Uhtred’s first failed attempt to reclaim Bebbanburgh, or the time he and Breda tried to talk to their friend’s ghost. I am interested in this period because it’s not yet the Middle Ages, though you can see the outlines beginning to emerge; everything is DIY, rough and ready, down-to-earth, organic. I felt this story conveyed that sense of the period well.
The script for The Last Kingdom, like the visuals, never shone with brilliance. But it never made me groan or cringe either, and sometimes it moved me. The writing was never less than competent, and sometimes more than. I studied this historical period in college and, watching The Last Kingdom, I noticed very few of the anachronistic howlers one usually finds in these kinds of things.
There was a characteristic moment in Seven Kings: Uhtred makes a speech about how they must forge an English identity from diverse communities, and Finan pipes up ‘I don’t have to say I’m English, do I?’ It was a neat moment: the 21st-century Irish actor might be ad libbing, or the 10th-century character might be speaking from a point of view rooted in his own time. Uhtred has competently (not brilliantly) given the story a sense of theme and purpose; without undermining this, Finan has managed to cut across any danger of grandiosity or chauvinism. Somebody was paying close attention to what was being said, and I appreciated that.
This is an appendix to my series of posts looking at the plausibility of Orwell’s Oceania and the merits of the novel it features in, 1984. Here is a timeline I worked out for Orwell’s invented world, based on clues and cues in the novel itself.
‘a long interval of peace in [Winston Smith’s] childhood’
An atomic strike near London, early 1950s
c. 1950-1952
Surprise air raid alarm in London; this is likely a surprise attack by Eastasia, probably with atomic bombs
From this date, world war is continuous
1950s: Atomic warfare causes huge destruction. Hundreds of cities, mostly in North America, European Russia and Western Europe destroyed (the only named city is Colchester)
By ‘the middle of the twentieth century’, Russia absorbs Europe, USA absorbs British Empire.
1950s:
In England, an underground struggle by socialist revolutionaries, a revolution and a civil war
Street fighting in London for several months
‘one of the first great purges’
1954:
Disappearance of Winston’s father
c. 1955-57:
A time of air raids and civil conflicts, of political youth gangs wearing shirts of the same colour, proclamations, severe food shortages
Political ‘disappearances’ are already commonplace
Disappearance of Winston’s mother and sister
Winston enters state institutions
Birth of Julia in 1957
Piccadilly Circus during street fighting in London, 1950s
By 1960:
Eastasia has emerged as a unified state from ‘a decade of confused fighting’
Around 1960:
Ingsoc becomes a widely-used term
1960s:
Big Brother becomes a household name
c. 1962-4
Revolutionary leaders Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford are photographed in prominent roles at some important Party function in New York
Around 1965:
Goldstein flees
‘in the middle ‘sixties’, ‘the old, discredited leaders of the party’ were ‘purged’ – ‘wiped out once and for all.’
1965:
Oceania currently at war with Eurasia
Julia’s grandfather disappears
Jones, Aaronson, Rutherford disappear
1966 or 7:
Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford confess in a show trial and, around a year later, disappear
1970:
The older generation of Party leaders is wiped out. Only Big Brother remains
Around 1973:
Winston is married to Katharine for 15 months
1977:
Winston has a strange dream involving O’Brien
O’Brien later says that he has been working on Winston’s case since this date
1980:
Oceania is now at war with Eurasia
1981:
Winston seeks out a sex worker
1984:
Ninth Three-Year Plan under way
Oceania conquers large parts of India
From Hate Week on, Oceania is now at war with Eastasia
Winston and Julia are arrested
At least one year later:
Oceania, now at war with Eurasia, first suffers defeat in Africa then wins a significant victory
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During the first year of the Covid pandemic, a spray-painted slogan appeared on a road sign near Galway in the west of Ireland. Above the words ‘Monivea 23km’ was sprayed ‘G ORWELL 1984.’ Either someone had a grudge against the village of Monivea, or someone was trying to say that we were living in 1984, presumably because of Covid restrictions. If we Google George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984, we get the same message repeated a thousand times: ‘We are living in 1984.’
I have recently re-read some f***ing Orwell, namely 1984. It’s a good story, if like me you have a high tolerance for relentless misery. But no, 1984 has not happened – anywhere, ever. Not in Galway in 2020, not on pre-Musk Twitter and no, not even in the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalinist terror.
This is the first post in a series about Orwell’s 1984. Future posts will look at why I think it’s a good novel even though it’s implausible, the timeline, and the enigmatic character of Goldstein. All page references are from the 2008 Penguin paperback.
In 1980 the Science Fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote a caustic dismissal of 1984. He gets a few things wrong, and I suspect he only skimmed the novel on the re-read. Contrary to what he says, there is no way to tell if one is being spied on via telescreen at any given time (4). He claims that Britain is the seat of power in Oceania, but it’s pretty obvious that Britain has been reduced to a province of a US-based empire: it’s been renamed Airstrip One (which is funny satire but ridiculous worldbuilding), its anthem is ‘Oceania, ‘tis for thee,’ and its people use dollars (5, 8).
But Asimov is correct in his overall point that the real world has not developed in a 1984 direction. It has developed in the opposite direction. The coercive powers of states have grown, but it is not in some Stalinist way. It’s all in the service of corporate power and profits. We can be spied on through devices we carry around with us, but this technology is mostly used to sell us crap. In Oceania, there is no more racial division or religion, which is not the situation we face. The militarised cops and fedsbin the US don’t use their weapons to disappear anyone who commits ‘thoughtcrime.’ They use all that hardware to kill black people, to police the borders, or to infiltrate and entrap.
Multi-lithic world
In Oceania, the world has become nightmarishly uniform and monolithic. Anyone who is not ‘orthodox’ is liquidated. Our world is the opposite. What should we call it – multi-lithic? Everyone lives in their own extreme algorithm-curated bubble. Trump supporters and Q Anon types live in a different reality where they won the 2020 election. We now have cranks who run around filming themselves all day as they harass political opponents and tear up library books, all the while claiming that they live in a 1984 dystopia. In reality they would be the first to sign up for Ingsoc – they’d get to have cameras pointed at them all day.
People are not coerced into morning calisthenics, evenings at the community centre or mass rallies. Such ‘horrors’ seem quaint. Instead people live in a world where the public and social spheres are withering away and all relationships are monetised.
We don’t all gather for ‘Two Minutes’ Hate’ or ‘Hate Week’ against a state-approved enemy. We line up and write vitriolic messages at each other’s thumbnails, usually over trivial stuff. We are not prohibited from debating; we are encouraged to debate endlessly, feeding the algorithm and muddying the waters. But we are prevented, as far as possible, from exercising any real power over events. We can think what we like. But we are not to organise.
All these trends predated the internet, and were certainly discernible by the real-life year 1984.
But we are not simply talking about whether 1984 resembles the present day. We are asking whether it is plausible. And doesn’t the world of 1984 resemble certain societies from history, such as the Soviet Union?
Actually it doesn’t.
When reading this book as a teenager I took Oceania as a ‘more extreme’ version of the Soviet Union. That seems to be what Orwell intended. But since then I’ve done a bit of reading, and now I can tell you that Oceania is actually something completely different.
It would not be difficult to list superficial similarities between Big Brother and Stalin, Goldstein and Trotsky, Oceania and Soviet Russia. But that’s actually where the problem lies. In the ways Oceania should be like the USSR, it isn’t. In the ways it shouldn’t be like the USSR, it is.
Contempt for ‘proles’
Let’s start with the ‘proles.’ The Party believe that ‘proles and animals are free.’ (53-55) There are separate uniforms and even separate drinks for ‘proles’ (beer) and Outer Party (gin). There is open contempt for the ‘proles.’ In the USSR there was never a rhetorical dehumanisation of working-class and poor people. Exactly the opposite: workers were idealised and put on a pedestal. It was often hypocrisy (as when they crushed a workers’ uprising in Budapest ‘in the name of the working class‘), but that’s beside the point. Such open contempt would have been unimaginable. Trotsky in 1936 was scandalised even to hear that a manager had used the wrong form of address with a worker.
Social engineering
The Soviet Union is associated with (we might say ‘notorious for’) social engineering. Ingsoc has no such ambitions, beyond the ranks of the Party. It basically leaves the ‘proles’ to their own devices. There is no attempt to change their culture, to improve their health and living conditions, no attempt to provide healthcare or education. We are explicitly told there is less social mobility and poorer education than before the Revolution. Ingsoc has left people to rot in buildings that have been standing since Victoria; the USSR built entire cities. Even if we take the Soviet Union at its very worst, this was the opposite of its approach. Access to education was widened a hundredfold and there was free healthcare.
A less benevolent example: in the late ’20s – early ’30s the Stalin regime set about forcibly collectivising all the farms in the country. This led to a terrible famine and a fierce campaign of repression. But such an ambitious project is unimaginable in Oceania, where the state leaves 85% of the population to be Del Boy and Rodney.
Culture
What about culture? Ingsoc destroys books, translates Shakespeare and Milton into horrible Newspeak, destroys words, disdains beauty. The Soviet Union invented new words by the dozen, but it did not destroy old ones. Literary classics were made far more widely available and affordable across the Soviet Union and Stalinist Eastern Europe. Not-for-profit publishing meant there was actually much more emphasis on acquainting the people with what isboften called ‘high culture.’ In Oceania, separate media are produced for ‘proles.’ Michael Parenti points out that it was in fact after the return of capitalism, in the 1990s, that books were destroyed in industrial quantities, and the standard of literacy plummeted.
Science
There is no scientific progress under Ingsoc. Even military research consists of white elephants. In relation to the real Soviet Union, I have two words for you: Sputnik, AK-47. The USSR promoted Marxism, which is a materialistic philosophy. Ingsoc openly rejects ’19th century ideas about the laws of nature’ (277-8) and embraces a totally relativistic ideology – matter only exists in the human mind.
Sex
There is no evidence whatsoever that there has been any advance for women under Ingsoc. Around page 15 we have the unintentionally amusing phrase ‘girl, of about twenty-seven.’ In Part 2 Chapter VIII O’Brien assumes that Winston speaks for Julia. Also, the party hates sex. But for the first 15 years after the revolution, the Soviet Union had the most socially liberal regime in the world when it came to sex and the liberation of women.
This paperback was obviously marketed in a certain way – spare a thought for the poor divil who bought this book expecting a lot of sex and, 50 pages in, was utterly traumatised
Permanent Warfare
The Soviet Union, like Oceania, was hampered by huge military expenses. But the Russian Revolution was born out of an anti-war movement. The Reds were far keener on peace proposals than the Whites during the Civil War. The Polish-Soviet War lasted less than a year. There were no external conflicts between 1921 and 1938. The consistent foreign policy from the Stalin period on was to seek stability, even to the point of hesitating to support the Spanish Republic and North Korea.
Oceania is not the USSR
All the above shows that Oceania and Stalinist Russia are actually very different places, not just in degree but in kind. Most of the creepy Stalinesque detail about censorship is drawn from Orwell’s own experience doing censorship for the British state during World War Two. Doublethink is a powerful concept, and I value Orwell’s description of it. It’s an example of how this book has contributed a useful political vocabulary. But doublethink is a satire on extreme political partisanship generally. The grisly history of Stalinism gives many compelling examples of doublethink, but you can find examples in a lot of other places too. In other words: what does apply to the USSR often doesn’t apply uniquely to it.
But the ways Oceania is similar to the specifics of Soviet Union are even worse.
Oceania is a massive state encompassing three continents plus swathes of Africa and Asia, including four of the most developed industrial countries on planet Earth: the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. It is not isolated. It is not poor.
And yet: ‘very likely no boots had been produced at all,’ and ‘perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot’(44). No boots at all! There are shortages of razor-blades, darning-wool, buttons and shoelaces (52). ‘Prole’ women fight one another for saucepans (73). The people of London live in ‘patched-up nineteenth-century houses.’ O’Brien gives Winston a mysterious drink he has never seen before and says, ‘It is called wine’ (178). According to Goldstein’s book, ‘The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs.’ Winston works a 60-hour week and sometimes has to pull extra shifts on top of that (Part 2, Chapter III).
OK: the real Soviet Union was characterised by exactly these kinds of shortages and, yes, the fields were cultivated with horse-ploughs. With Stakhanovism and Subbotniks (‘voluntary’ Sunday work), Soviet people in the 1930s worked very long hours.
But Russia had horse-ploughs, long hours and shortages before the Revolution. It was in the decades after the Revolution that the horse was replaced with the tractor and consumer goods were made widely available for the first time. As for work – well, the stereotype of the Soviet worker in the 1980s was not that he was some overworked Stakhanovite, but that you’d see him drinking beer and playing cards next to the roadworks he was supposed to be doing.
The missing links in Orwell’s worldbuilding are clear from the novel’s treatment of two drinks: tea and coffee.
Julia is able to find tea on the black market because Oceania has conquered parts of South Asia. Good! That makes sense. But for some reason coffee and chocolate are always difficult to find, even though all of South and Central America have been core territories of Oceania for 35 years.
Underdevelopment
Unlike the USSR, Oceania is not a semi-feudal economy cut off from the markets and resources of the world. Unlike the USSR, it is not a country going through an industrial revolution in a decade. It has no business being so extravagantly poor. The ugly trappings of the ‘grimy landscape’ (5) of Oceania are out of their proper place. They belong to early-twentieth-century Russia – or, more precisely, to the underdeveloped parts of the world. They are not features of ‘communism’ but of underdeveloped countries, whether communist, capitalist or feudal.
The open brutality of the secret police, and the crudeness of government propaganda – these, too, are borrowed clothes which hang awkwardly on Oceania. They are features, again, not of ‘communism’ but of underdevelopment. They are not a sign of a regime with unshakeable foundations but of a precarious regime.
You might object that Spain, Italy and Germany all went totalitarian. So why not Britain? But Spain, Italy and Germany went fascist, and fascism has completely different origins which it’s not worth getting into here. Oceania very clearly follows the pattern of the USSR, not Spain, Italy or Germany. As Asimov points out, the trappings are all communist, the parallels all Soviet.
‘I do not understand why‘
Goldstein’s book-within-a-book finally explains this great mystery. Ingsoc spends all the money on war, so as to deliberately keep the people poor, so as to maintain control. But for 90% of readers, this explanation is not necessary. They already know (or think they know) why Oceania is poor: because of communism. And Orwell has done absolutely nothing to clear up the misunderstanding.
This explanation, by the way, is coherent on its own terms, but that doesn’t mean it’s plausible.
Winston writes, ‘I understand how [the system oppresses the people]. I do not understand why.’ Towards the end of the book he gets the following answer: humanity could have superabundance, equality and democracy; but 2% of the population, the Inner Party, have taken control, and are deliberately wasting all the wealth, just so that they can maintain poverty, and with it inequality, and with it their own power (216-217).
This explanation rests on certain important insights about the relationship between scarcity and tyranny, between economic equality and political equality. But it puts the cart before the horse. In the USSR, scarcity created the dictatorship. In Oceania, the dictatorship deliberately creates scarcity.
But how such a dictatorship was able to entrench itself in the first place is not clear. Britain after World War Two was an advanced capitalist country with a high level of education, an abundance of material goods and solid infrastructure (to say nothing of the huge empire). Moreover, this advanced country and empire are part of a federation with, well, the entire Western Hemisphere. Oceania is not poor and it is not isolated. You can’t copy-and-paste Stalin into this setting. He doesn’t belong there any more than does the horse-plough or shoelace rationing.
You might argue (as Orwell does) that all revolutionary leaders secretly want to be sadistic tyrants (275-276). I don’t think that’s true, but even if it was it wouldn’t matter. These crypto-dictators wouldn’t be able to take and hold power after a popular revolution unless the extraordinary conditions prevailing in Russia were somehow duplicated in Britain.
What to expect in the next post
Oceania is not a plausible setting. But there is one reading of the novel which makes it plausible. I’m going to go into that next week, along with some other positive things about 1984. Or i might decide to publish a timeline of Oceania. We’ll see.
But as a short answer to the question posed in this post – no, 1984 is not plausible. Thankfully, it has never happened anywhere, ever.
The Unspoken Name begins with a description of a shrine in the mountains, and of the child sacrifice ritual practised there by a bunch of tusk-faced people. Our main character is Csorwe, who has been singled out as a future offering to the cave-dwelling god known as the Unspoken Name. The wizard Sethennai comes to visit – a charismatic fellow with purple skin and pointy ears – and saves her from her fate. She runs away with him to discover the world beyond the morbid religious order in which she was raised.
Yes, this is the story of that brilliant Le Guin novel The Tombs of Atuan. And like the Earthsea novels, the world conveyed here is clear and vivid. But in The Unspoken Name there are two major differences. First, all of that happens in the first few chapters; it’s only the set-up. Second, this pointy-eared wizard Sethennai is no Ged. Yes, he’s rescued Csorwe from death and hired her as his assistant. But she’s going to spend the rest of the novel figuring out that he is a bad person.
Sethennai is not malicious or sadistic; he doesn’t cackle when he hurts someone. Nor is he a ‘loveable rogue’ or anti-hero. Nor is he a torn, tormented character. He’s not for redeeming. He is simply a powerful, ambitious man who sees no wrong in using people and then discarding them.
This is bad enough for Csorwe, who hero-worships him even as he sends her into terrible danger for his own selfish reasons. His other assistant, Tal, is in love with him. Tal’s narrative voice is a perfectly-judged blend of pain and humour.
Csorwe meets a young magician, Shuthmili, and the two young women gradually fall in love. Maybe, the reader hopes, this can drive a wedge between Csorwe and Sethennai. But Shuthmili has to break with her own corps/ cult of creepy psychics.
You may have noticed something: I’ve got this far without talking much about setting. Characters and relationships are the rocket fuel of this story. On paper, there’s too much plot. But the way it works out, it never feels heavy or dense. It’s very unlike Earthsea in a lot of ways – but like Earthsea, it feels light even when it really isn’t.
The setting is distinct enough that it’s not easy to slot it in to some corresponding real world era, but it’s kind of early modern. It’s a vast number of worlds, linked through a maze and a system of portals, navigated by flying ships. Oshaar (Csorwe’s home), Tlaantothe (Sethennai’s domain) and Qarsazh (Shuthmili’s home) are all different worlds – maybe planets, maybe universes. But many or most of the worlds are old, decaying, succumbing to entropy, abandoned. So this is a diverse setting, rich in ancient magical ruins for the characters to explore and to have adventures in, with a deep past.
By the end, Csorwe is ready to dismiss the Unspoken Name, the god for whom she was going to be killed. There is a very creepy moment when she at last confronts him, but the way it turns out there is more pity than horror. The story has outgrown him.
Another interesting point: it is very gently suggested that the Oshaaru are orcs, the Tlaantothe people are elves and the Qarsazhi are humans. But they all behave as humans with tusks or pointy ears.
The Thousand Eyes by AK Larkwood, Tor, 2022
To begin with, I thought The Thousand Eyes trod on the edge of being boring. Not so much so that I put it down, but I didn’t have a sense of where it was going. The main characters from the first novel, minus Sethennai, have formed a mercenary gang. They are bantering and exploring ruins.
Then I was irritated when the story took a sudden turn. They revive an ancient god who wants to conquer the world, and this evil god possesses the body of one of our main characters. I was irritated because I don’t care for this ‘possession’ trope.
But before the dust settled on that, the story took another turn. And I was hooked. What Larkwood did with the story was simple and bold: she jumped forward in time twenty years. The ancient god, in the body of the main character we know and like (I won’t say which one), has carved out an empire. We meet older and more cynical versions of our other characters, plus one their optimistic offspring, as they conspire to resist and overthrow the evil empire.
Suddenly, it’s all gone a bit Star Wars, and I mean that as a good thing. It’s a story with momentum, full of cool concepts and images, driven along by strong characters who have a simple and awesome goal: to overthrow an empire.
Tal’s gallows-humour narrative voice gains extra pathos given the bitter years that have passed. Our characters come to realise that to overthrow the evil empire there’s one man they are going to need on their side: Sethennai. Damn! They’ve just got over that guy, and now they have to go back and beg him for help.
The map
This time, the plot is simpler and the story stronger; still, some of the twists and turns towards the end have gone fuzzy in my memory just a few months after I read it.
The Thousand Eyes is more about the fate of cities and religions and nations than was The Unspoken Name. For all that, the political world-building is not entirely to my taste. Political struggles are not moved by socio-economic forces or institutions. The destinies of leaders and empires are decided by a handful of characters, by their command of magic and not their command of the state apparatus; by their relationships with each other, not by their relationship with the means of production. The people, in theory, matter. But even the wealthy and powerful don’t have any real deciding power over the outcome of events.
And given the way the story is put together, it would be unsatisfying if they did; while there is an epic struggle at the heart of it, this remains a story about a small circle of friends and frenemies. The stakes are always first and foremost personal.
I’m really looking forward to the third book and I gladly recommend the first two.
Is Sláine a primeval soul who poses challenging questions to us from the depths of Celtic myth or a knock-off Conan the Barbarian? This is the question I posed and struggled with in my three-part series looking at 40 years of Sláine.
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So it turns out The Witcher is better without The Witcher.
A long time ago I watched the first 3 or 4 episodes of The Witcher and never warmed to it. I liked the monster fights. But the production varied in quality from ‘dripping with Gothic atmosphere’ to ‘just plain tacky.’
The prequel series Blood Origin caught my attention by accident over the Christmas. Now, since watching it I’ve tried to read a review or two to find out why so many people (but not everyone) hated it. This one from Polygon was largely incomprehensible to me. It’s not just that I disagreed; I did not understand what the criteria were by which the series was being judged.
To my eyes, it was not a series that undermined the precious canon or a mess of a story which invited me to pick it apart to explain how it failed. It was a pulp swords-and-sorcery adventure which looked and sounded good, which had a cast of fun, engaging characters, which was focused and disciplined at a tight four episodes. The class war elements set up in the first episode with the rabble-rousing song ‘The Black Rose’ paid off in spades at the end when a revolution was part of the final showdown.
That review from Polygon says: ‘There’s a class conflict that keeps getting hinted at through a song Élie [sic] is famous for, but there’s never much consideration of what that actually means, in-universe, beyond “lower-class folks are hungrier than their elite counterparts.”’
I said of Andor that I didn’t need it to be a Ken Loach film. Well… I don’t need a three-hour fantasy story even to be Andor, let alone Ken Loach. The class war element was not at all simplistic – it was just focused and coherent.
One last quote from that review: ‘When Élie promises Scían the chance to reclaim the sacred sword of her people, it’s introduced in the conversation with no explanation for how Élie would’ve even known it was gone.’
Not only did that not bother me, it didn’t strike me as a thing which might conceivably bother anyone. Éile has lived in this world all her life and presumably knows about various things. If she has shoelaces (I can’t remember) she probably learned to tie them at some point in her life, but we don’t need a flashback explaining this.
Who first came up with the trope of making Elves speak the Queen’s English? In this, the elves have Welsh, Irish and other regional accents. If that’s a feature of The Witcher (I can’t remember) then good for The Witcher. Tolkien-variety elves are a mythical reflection of Celtic peoples as seen through Anglo-Saxon eyes.
They got the tone just right. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but then it doesn’t let silly banter undermine the serious moments either. After just two and a half episodes, we get a sequence where the seven adventurers sit down and have a party. That strikes me as a difficult thing to pull off; the writers have got to warm the viewers up to the characters and the characters to each other. Blood Origin pulled that off.
The cast was uniquely diverse. I say ‘uniquely’ because off the top of my head I can’t think of another TV series or movie in the genre that does such a good job of reflecting the diversity of our species in its cast.
I felt it could have gone on just a bit longer, another episode or two, and that the promised ‘Conjunction of the Spheres’ ended up being skimmed over. Neither of these things was a deal-breaker for me; in fact I was relieved that it wasn’t a sprawling, incoherent mess that was too busy setting up hypothetical future seasons to tell its own story. I could forgive it for erring in the other direction.
Finally and crucially, I was relieved that platinum-blonde Solid Snake was nowhere to be seen. I don’t want to criticise The Witcher too much because that would be churlish in this context. Geralt of Rivia has an iconic look, I suppose, but I never found him interesting in my limited exposure to the show. His absence leaves a lot of room for other characters to throw their weight around.
Anyone familiar with the stuff I write about here on The 1919 Review might suspect that I only enjoyed this show because it had two things I liked: class struggle and Irish stuff (‘Inis Dubh’ means ‘Black Island’). But if they hadn’t been there, I would still have enjoyed it: I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and I appreciate a punchy, well-crafted tale of sorcery and adventure with strong characters and a vulgar edge. Blood Origin is all that.
Or Legolas being a ninja, or jokes about ‘dwarf-tossing.’
In the books, there’s an incident where an evil oak tree eats several hobbits. They left that bit out. They cut Tom Bombadil, Goldberry, the Old Forest and the Barrow-Wights. Twenty years pass between the birthday and the big quest. Frodo is 50. They compressed all that just a little.
They cut the hobbits singing in the bath. In fact they cut nearly all the songs, and most of the twee hobbit banter.
They dramatically simplified the big battles, and dramatically expanded the smaller-scale fights. They added little side-adventures and contrived arguments.
They turned ‘the fellowship ran down a flight of stairs’ into this.
And nobody really minded. It was mostly great.
Now,
Take a deep breath.
Because in 2022, in the TV show Rings of Power,
They gave speaking parts to 3 or 4 black actors,
…and suddenly a lot of people on the internet were very worried about ‘staying true to Tolkien’s vision.’
Funny how that was the deal-breaker!
Not this,
or this,
or this,
or this.
A screen adaptation that was ‘true to the spirit of Tolkien’ would have a lot more sing-songs in the bath, chipper hiking dialogue and obscure melancholy poems. The camera would linger for hours on trees and shrubs.
There’s every reason to have a diverse cast in Middle Earth. Tolkien described characters as ‘dark’ or ‘ swarthy’ in almost every chapter (good guys are usually dark, bad guys are swarthy. And yes, they’re all guys).
And if, just for the sake of argument, he did write, ‘by the way, categorically, none of these people were black’, why should we care 70 years later? Why would you care about skin pigment, if you don’t care about the scouring of the shire, the Dúnadain, Elladan and Elrohir, Prince Imrahil, Ioreth, Erkenbrand, Ghan-Buri-Ghan, the Dunlendings..?
By the way, Tolkien was sometimes racially insensitive in his writing. There are a few features and examples you can point to. There is a preoccupation with heredity, and there is a vile phrase in Book V Chapter VI. Yes: I’m sure you’re shocked to learn that an aging English Catholic professor who was born in South Africa and wrote in the 1930s to the 1950s was sometimes racially insensitive. Though at times he was surprisingly OK.
(Those Peter Jackson movies are actually dodgier on race for their time than Tolkien was for his time).
But that is not really a ‘gotcha’ for either side in these online debates.
Because when you adapt something, you make a choice about what to focus on. With Tolkien, there are themes like compassion, redemption, comradeship, self-sacrifice in struggle, and humble people rising up to change the world; and features like invented languages and histories, melancholy hints of a deep past, tense chases and battles, fantastical creatures and places.
Then there’s the ring, which poses the question of whether you would really have the integrity to destroy some great source of evil.
The movies nailed a few of those things, and that is why nobody really minded about the skull avalanche.
You could focus on some of those things, or you could make a fetish of skin colour, as if the Lord of the Rings was just a more upmarket version of 300. Then you would be putting a minor and unattractive feature of Tolkien’s writing up on a pedestal. You shouldn’t worship Tolkien, but if you insist on it, don’t be worshipping his backside.
And don’t be a racist, but if you insist on it, you’re not fooling anyone by pretending it’s about pious respect for a mid-century Oxford academic. If he could see us, or any of the screen adaptations, he’d tell us all where to get off.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Dune. As I mentioned, its underlying concept isn’t actually that great. I wrote, ‘It’s about a teenager who […] becomes emperor of the galaxy by convincing native people that he’s their god,’ and then I added something about phallic monsters.
Stated so baldly, the concept would actually put a lot of people off. The real brilliance of Dune, I argued, is in the delivery.
Here are ten Science Fiction novels which are not as well-known as Dune but which have it all: great concept and great execution.
1. The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin (1974) In The Dispossessed, the great Ursula K Le Guin sets herself the task of describing an anarcho-communist society. An inventor named Shevek has lived all his life on the arid moon of Anarres. On Anarres, all property is public and the state has ‘withered away’ – there are no police, courts or prisons, there is no money and no large-scale private property. On the basis of voluntary cooperation, this society is highly-organised and industrialised. It provides housing, food, healthcare and education to all.
But this is not one of those novels where the story is just window-dressing for a political lecture (a valid genre – The Iron Heelis very good on its own terms – but unpopular today). Anarres is not a utopia. This moon is poor in resources, so the common standard of living is not luxury. The dissolution of the family means that child-rearing can be left to institutions. Now, these institutions do a perfectly good job, but it’s obvious that Shevek has unresolved pain caused by his mother’s abdication of responsibility for him. Academic rivalry can get vicious. Political controversies still lead to violence, as we see in the first pages.
The story is about Shevek growing fed up with Anarres – though as he explores other worlds and societies, capitalist and sort-of Stalinist, he sees that they are far worse.
2. Rosewater by Tade Thompson (2016)
An alien lands in rural Nigeria. But this is not a slightly funny-looking humanoid in a flying saucer or tripod. It’s a vast biological presence, a kind of dome. Once a year it heals those afflicted by mutilation and disease, attracting a pilgrimage. But the real agenda of this alien presence is unclear.
Thompson shows how, decades later, a whole society has been reshaped by the alien presence, and we witness a shadow struggle of psychics and intelligence agencies.
3. Iron Council by China Miéville (2004)
In a time when steampunk and fantasy Victoriana were cutting-edge, Miéville posed a very relevant question: in all these gears and goggles, where’s the steampunk Karl Marx? Where’s the steampunk Paris Commune?
That suggests the premise of Iron Council, the last part of the Bas-Lag trilogy (each can be read as a standalone). Civil war engulfs the city of New Crobuzon as the old regime clings to power in the face of a workers’ uprising. All this in a dark and floridly bizarre steampunk fantasy world where convicts are punished by being turned into semi-machines, and spirals can be magical weapons of mass destruction.
In Iron Council, Miéville also asked a question that nobody else would have thought of: what if a frontier railway-builders’ strike led to the creation of a nomadic railway-borne communist republic? What if this train had to rush half-way across the world to aid the New Crobuzon Revolution?
Today’s cover image, a painting of Miéville’s New Crobuzon from Alchetron.com. Original artist unknown
4. American War by Omar El-Akkad (2017)
In the near future, the southern states of the US start a civil war over a fossil fuel ban. In this novel’s bleak vision, war is a matter of misguided desperate people being crushed physically by high-tech weaponry, and crushed mentally and spiritually by prisons.
As the war settles down to a guerrilla struggle, a federation of Arab states sends agents into the sprawling refugee camps. They groom a generation of suicide terrorists to carry on what everyone knows is a doomed struggle. And that’s not even the worst part.
This bleak story draws you in with a well-drawn world and characters. It all feels painfully real. The foreign agents are prolonging this war for their own selfish geopolitical purposes – but that’s exactly what US agencies have been doing for decades, all over the world and especially in Arab countries. This parallel seems to emerge naturally from the story and world. It is not one-to-one and it is not immediately obvious. The world and story work on its own terms – though for me the ending was bit too extravagant to be credible.
5. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (2008, trans 2014)
How would aliens communicate with humanity? Imagine intelligent life that has evolved on a world whose rules and dangers we can barely comprehend. In Liu’s novel, these aliens explain their history to us through an incredibly trippy cult videogame that they infiltrate into our cyberspace. Our characters discover and play this game. At first it seems totally bizarre, but meaning gradually emerges from it. This is how the aliens communicate with the humans, and how the novel communicates with us. We come to grasp the mind-bending cosmic reality of an alien world.
What’s with the searing flashbacks to Mao’s Cultural Revolution? This ties in thematically with the alien story. There emerges a political movement of humans, fanatics who support the aliens and hate their own species. The moral of the story, implicitly, is as follows: all hail bloody state repression, the only force that can save us from dangerous fanatics, be they Maoists or alien proxies. It’s a horrible message but implicit, not explicit, and one that is unfortunately pretty common in cutural texts from all parts of the world, the US or Britain every bit as much as China.
6. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1974)
A young soldier is sent to war on a distant planet. Our main character jets back and forth across the galaxy at light speed, from earth to the battlefields and back again; he ages a few months, but meanwhile on earth centuries pass.
The military sci-fi aspects are really well-realised, but the heart and soul of the book is the very literal ‘future shock’ experienced by Private William Mandella as he fights for a society he no longer understands.
7. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler (1993)
In Parable of the Sower we watch a near-apocalyptic California descend into a post-apocalyptic California. But this is not Mad Max or Fallout. Violence is all around, but it is not the answer. The answer is to band together and help one another selflessly, and that is what we see happening, in spite of suspicion and scarcity.
The main character is a visionary young woman who is making up her own religion. Certain other Science Fiction prophets have used religion to wage intergalactic jihad. But in Parable of the Sower, it is a creed of compassion and mutual aid, with obvious relevance for the tasks which face our band of survivors.
Meanwhile, the causes of the collapse of society are not singular or simple. There is no alien invasion, zombie virus or nuclear strike. It’s simply that corporate power has grown to a terrible scale and has destroyed society, the economy and the environment. The start of the novel is not too distant from the reality today.
8. The Stone Sky by NK Jemisin (2017)
On the Broken Earth, devastating earthquakes are a regular occurrence. Enter the orogones, humans who can control geology with their minds. This makes them saviours but also potential destroyers; an orogene in a fit of rage can cause a whole town to collapse into an abyss.
The Stone Sky (2017) is the third part of the Broken Earth trilogy. (Yes, you have to read them in order). The Fifth Season (2015)and The Obelisk Gate (2016) are great in their own ways, but in The Stone Sky the brilliant concepts are fully-developed and the mysteries are revealed. Most importantly our characters, who have often seemed like shadowy sketches, emerge fully into the light. The relationship between the main character and her daughter define the novel, and at the climax of the story everything comes together in a single moment, a single decision. Yes, after all the horror we get a happy ending.
Judge Dredd and a punk biker have to cross a nuclear-wasteland USA on motorbikes. Crazy adventures ensue. This is the Cursed Earth Saga. Dredd and co are attacked by a tiny but fierce robot general, free a captive alien king, and come face to face with the cryogenically frozen president who caused the nuclear war. It’s wacky, fast-paced, gruesome and sometimes disarmingly tender.
From 2000ad.com
Dredd returns to his futuristic mega-city. He’s not there five minutes before the insane Judge Cal seizes control of the city. Inspired by the reign of Caligula, the story traces a very satisfying back-and-forth struggle between Dredd and Cal. Cal descends into ever-more ridiculous and evil excesses until finally he sentences the entire population to death and lines them up to be eaten by alien mercenaries; Dredd raises a revolution, arms the people, and links up with unlikely allies such as the sewer-dwelling mutant Fergie.
In the decades since these stories came out, Dredd has had many satirical and epic and memorable adventures. But to my mind they has never quite equalled the Cursed Earth and Judge Cal.
10. The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi (2015)
Rounding off the list, an all-too-topical premise. In The Water Knife, the whole south-eastern United States have dried up. The cities are dying. Bloody struggles and intrigues unfold as leaders try everything short of all-out war to seize control of the water supplies. The ‘Water Knife’ of the title is Angel, a tough guy who secures water supplies for Las Vegas.
Something like this is going to happen. I happened to see online just the other day that the water levels in Lake Mead, Nevada, are frighteningly low. Bacigalupi brings to life what it could to mean for politics, culture and the dark underworld of organised crime and the secret state.
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