Facebook and Instagram have put forward a rationale for the plagiarism they are doing in order to develop AI tools.
From theGuardian.co.uk: ‘According to Meta’s defence, there is “no economically feasible mechanism” for AI developers to obtain licensed copies of the “astonishingly large volume” of books needed to train AI.’
Well, if there’s no feasible way to do it, then just don’t steal the books. You can just not do it.
‘Meta “would have to initiate individualised negotiations with millions of authors”…’
That sounds very difficult. It also sounds like Meta’s problem, not ours. So again, how about, don’t do it?
It continues:
‘…a process which “would be onerous for even a few authors; it is practically impossible for hundreds of thousands or millions.”’
They are complaining that unless governments just give them permission to steal it all, it’s ‘practically impossible.’ Word of advice: if the thing you want to do is incompatible with paying authors for using their work for your profits, then it’s a bad thing and it should be practically impossible.
David Cornwell began writing fiction (under the pen name John le Carré) while working as a British intelligence officer in Central Europe in the middle of the century. Talking to Channel 4 in later life, he said that during this espionage work he was never himself in any danger. The interviewer asked a good follow-up question: whether he had ever placed anyone else in danger. Le Carré replied, with a stony expression, that he would rather not say. The camera lingered on his face and we could read there what we read in his books: the troubled conscience of a spook. I have surprised myself by reading an unlucky number of the novels in which this man wrestled with his conscience. That is, half of the 26 novels he published in about 60 years. Some of these I’ve read, others I’ve had read to me by the excellent Michael Jayston thanks to Borrowbox and public libraries. If those thirteen novels skew toward his best works, and I think they do, then I’m in a pretty good position to give some recommendations. Over this and the next few posts I’m going to give my short review of each one. I’ve tagged this post ‘What are the best John le Carré books.’ But my regular readers may have noticed that I don’t go in for scoring books out of 100, or even ten or five, and I’m not keen on rating them like athletes. It would take me twenty seconds to tell you the five le Carré novels that, right this minute, I imperfectly remember liking best, according to my tastes and opinions at the time I read them, for what that’s worth. But these are all very good books. It would be more purposeful to write a little about each one and what I thought about it. At the end of each post I’ll offer some gestures toward rankings and recommendations. If you want to know which le Carré book to read, and if you’re going to take my word for it, take a few thousand words while you’re at it.
Call for the Dead (1961)
Original cover. Note that Mr le Carré is still a ‘crime novelist.’
Le Carré’s first novel was a murder mystery and not really an espionage novel. But Call for the Dead introduces his most well-known character, George Smiley, a quiet and retiring senior spook (literally – like Iron Man, he retires at the end of every novel only to show up again in the next). We begin by learning that his beautiful wife has run off with a race-car driver, and by seeing his stoicism in the face of this betrayal. Smiley’s humility conceals his sharp mind and dogged will. As the novel opens, he has been running security checks on a civil servant named Fennon, only for that Fennon to turn up dead, apparently by suicide. Smiley is not fooled – Smiley alone is not fooled – and he starts unravelling a case that involves East German spies. It is a short, sharp story that’s well-paced and populated by compelling characters.
Many features that will become familiar in le Carré’s world here resolve themselves out of the mid-century murk for the first time. Communism appears as an illiberal, violent and underhanded force. But it’s not some cosmic evil from outside space and time. Of our three characters who are (or used to be) communist, all have good motives. The civil servant Fennon took part in hunger marches with Welsh miners; his wife Elsa is a holocaust survivor who is enraged to see former Nazis creep back into power in West Germany; Frey is a dedicated anti-fascist who used to be an agent of Smiley’s during the war. Smiley doesn’t hate his adversaries. Rather, he feels a pained and partial self-recognition when they reveal themselves. Smiley sees more of himself in them than he sees in his own pompous and parochial superiors. How is it different from later le Carré? There is no real critique of Britain’s intelligence services, no forays beyond the Iron Curtain. All in all, we are in cosier territory here.
When I read this: c 2023 Locations: London Why read it? John le Carré’s first novel; George Smiley’s first appearance; an accomplished thriller. Memorable moments: When Smiley arrives home to find an East German spy opening the door for him, only quick thinking and a cool head save his life.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was written when the Berlin Wall had just been built, and it captured the zeitgeist powerfully, going on to wild commercial success. Alec Leamas is a burned-out, hard-drinking spy whose agents have all been exterminated by East German intelligence. He returns to London where Control (leader of the intelligence agency known as ‘The Circus’) enlists Leamas for one last solo mission. While Call for the Dead was a traditional murder mystery, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold has a brow-furrowing plot revolving around spy agencies bluffing, double-bluffing and triple-bluffing each other. As the novel goes on it gets more claustrophobic and paranoid. It’s not a spoiler to say that Leamas has been lied to by Control (and by Smiley, who puts in a few appearances). The villain Mundt returns from Call for the Dead, and Fiedler, a principled and well-intentioned Jewish communist working for the Stasi, channels familiar energies (perhaps an echo of Frey, though to a more tragic end here). Towards the end Control’s real agenda is revealed as devastating and ruthless. If you ever catch yourself feeling too warm and fuzzy about George Smiley, remember what he did to Alec Leamas and Liz Gold. Gold is a young woman Alec Leamas meets when he’s busy building his legend prior to his final mission (A ‘legend’ in this context is a kind of espionage method acting – the cover story which a spy not only concocts but lives and documents in order to fool the other side.) Soon Leamas learns something surprising about his girlfriend. She tentatively begins to explain ‘I believe in history…’ and he bursts out laughing. ‘You’re not a bloody communist, are you?’ She has no idea her boyfriend is a wounded cold warrior, so she’s a bit confused at his amusement, but she’s relieved that her political affiliation doesn’t scare him off. That’s a good moment, with irony flying in all directions, but I think le Carré’s depiction of Liz is patronising overall, and it’s a weakness of the novel. I get that she’s supposed to be the innocent in all this, but she’s way too innocent. She actually dislikes everything about being in the Communist Party apart from the peace marches. Her party comrade is simultaneously a gay man (portrayed without sympathy), and a lech toward her. She tolerates all this and more for reasons that are not clear. A more streetwise Liz would have been just as sympathetic but more believable – someone who, like Leamas, has made ethical trade-offs to pursue what she believes is right.
When I read this: c 2011 Locations: East Germany, London Why read it? The novel that made John Le Carré’s name and launched his career; his first spy novel proper, introducing his dark and morally dubious portrayal of the world of espionage Memorable moments: The story begins and ends with desperate people making a break for it at the Berlin Wall – whose construction was recent news at the time this book was published
The Looking Glass War (1965)
The Looking Glass War is a brutally unglamorous story. It revolves around The Department, a distinct intelligence organisation overshadowed by George Smiley’s ‘Circus.’ The Department has been reduced to a small staff without much funding, with its Director Leclerc wallowing in a perverse nostalgia for the days of World War Two, when he used to regularly send young men to their deaths. When an East German defector brings hints of a missile build-up, Leclerc embarks on an escalating series of risky operations to verify the data. Our main characters fear an imminent re-run of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but beneath their fear they really want to believe it’s true. Because, what a coup for The Department! They feel they deserve this. For most of the book we don’t know if we’re in the midst of a cock-up or a conspiracy. At the climax, we follow an agent on a quixotic mission beyond the Iron Curtain. But mostly the conflict is office politics, the cause is nostalgia and bureaucratic prestige, and the subterfuge is inter-agency rather than international. For example, the Department has to borrow radios from the Circus, without letting them know anything about the intel they have or the operation they are planning. If the Circus get wind of it, they will take over. Le Carré is good at making office politics compelling, at describing one self-important bureaucrat witheringly through the eyes of another equally self-important bureaucrat. He appears to loathe the upper tiers of British society, but he speaks effortlessly in their voice.
The most memorable character besides Lelclerc does not fit into the familiar British-officer-class mould at all. This is Fred Leiser, a Polish immigrant who played a heroic role behind enemy lines for The Department during World War Two. Leiser has no stake in the intelligence world anymore; he has settled into civilian life. But the Department convince him to come back and risk his life on a mission into East Germany. I was pretty horrified at how this poor guy is groomed and flattered and tricked. At the same time Leiser is a strong-willed, rather arrogant character who actively chooses to do this, and for all the wrong reasons. Le Carré had evidently learned how to portray a guileless innocent.
And if we’re going to talk about themes that will be big later making their first appearance here, consider The Department as a metaphor for post-imperial Britain. In later novels we see The Circus itself in the same position as The Department, with the CIA as the bigger counterpart from whom it is trying to secure resources, but also to keep its petty secrets and barren intrigues.
When I read this: c 2023 Locations: Finland, West Germany, East Germany, London Why read it? A more tragicomic take on the dark underworld of intelligence; all the troubling morality of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold but with murkier stakes. Memorable moments: We are subjected to a scene of haunting dismalness when Avery visits the flat of his colleague who has died mysteriously while on a mission; later, we have the humorous tension between Fred Leiser and the sergeant who is training him.
Honourable mention here for A Small Town in Germany (1968), which I tackled in 2011 or so but didn’t get far into. It concerns a fictional and (then) near-future student movement in Germany which espouses an inchoate mishmash of left and right politics. I think I was put off by the author’s dismissal of the student radicals. I remain curious and might tackle it again.
Summing up… (and my favourite of these three novels)
The basic pitch of early le Carré was that he was selling a more unvarnished truth about intelligence – Forget James Bond, he seemed to say, this is the real deal; none of that moral complacency, none of those innocent assumptions about right and wrong. In its place the vision offered by early le Carré is that the West is benevolent and the East is malevolent, but that in the struggle the West has regrettably lost sight of its principles, and in terms of methods the two sides are equally devious and cruel.
Except not really, because in le Carré novels we see the Stalinists doing much worse things than we see the imperialists doing. Even leaving that aside, though, isn’t that vision complacent in its own way? The idea of Britain and the United States as basically benevolent and good forces in the world, in contrast to the wicked Soviets, is not really compatible with my own understanding of the broader history. I know what the Soviets did in Hungary. But men of Leamas, Smiley and Guillam’s vintage ran gulag archipelagos in Malaysia and Kenya. The Soviets imposed dictatorships in Eastern Europe, and the capitalist countries imposed their own on their side of the Iron Curtain, for example in Greece. The Stalinist states were certainly cruder in their repressive methods than, say, the British state when operating on British soil upon white British subjects. But the Soviet bloc was basically conservative and defensive, not expansionist or aggressive. So the reality is murkier still than we see in early le Carré.
The paranoid multi-layered duel of deception in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is very powerful. But of these three novels, I most admire The Looking Glass War. Its tragicomedy and its basic theme of utter delusion ring truer to me given the above points.
Le Carré’s novels of the 1960s were tight and focused. They were thrillers in cheap covers that I imagine you could carry in your jacket and read on the London Underground. In the 1970s, which I’ll look at next week, Smiley’s chilly and foggy world expands to an epic scale. These early novels have plenty of tension, humanity and power, but they are apprentice pieces by comparison with what is to come.
Last month OpenAI boss Sam Altman announced that his company had created an AI tool that could write a short story. You know the most depressing thing about this news? Sam Altman did not wake up one morning and, just on a whim, ask his software to write a story. His company worked really hard to get it to write a short story. No doubt some tech worker missed a kid’s birthday, maybe even birth, in order to work long hours on it. They plagiarized and polluted for it. Getting an AI that could write a short story was something they had to pursue.
Here’s the thing: even if it was easy and cheap and green, why would anyone want a machine that can write a short story? Is there a shortage of people who can write stories? Is writing stories a chore, like washing clothes or cutting grass? Are people crying out for relief from the burden of being creative?
I made it clear enough last week that I think this Gen AI thing does have limited uses (“a moderate productivity booster in certain situations”, as my commenter, The Director from MilitaryRealism.blog summed it up). I’m not qualified in any very technical fields like engineering, logistics or programming, but I’ll add that I can see potential uses that could be important.
Writing is more my area; I have an English degree and I’ve worked in teaching and libraries. So I don’t hesitate to say that short fiction is a glaring example of something that’s not a useful application of Gen AI by any measure.
Full disclosure, I haven’t read the AI-written short story. I read a lot, but I don’t happen to have a Gen-AI-short-story-shaped gap in my reading.
To illustrate this post, more cringe-inducing AI imagery from social media pages purporting to be about history and mythology
It’s not inevitable
The Guardian got some writers to react to the short story written by the machine. Most of the reactions ranged between ‘Wow, this is actually pretty good’ and ‘I fear for my livelihood.’ Kamila Shamsie pointed out that GenAI will reproduce and reinforce all the biases, all the racism and sexism etc, in its ‘training materials.’ For Nick Harkaway, the story is an ‘elegant emptiness’ and being moved by it is like a bird falling in love with its reflection in a window. He emphasises that ‘none of this will just happen. These are policy choices, and the end result will be the result of a conscious decision.’
That’s what the hype-mongers want us to forget, isn’t it?
The future promised by Gen AI is one where nobody is paid to do anything creative or educational; instead, computer programmes owned and controlled by a few billionaires create flat, uncanny versions of what humans used to create. For some reason we are all supposed to be excited about this. But whether you feel excitement or dread, either way you are making the mistake of treating the whole thing as inevitable and natural.
Actually, there are humans making decisions and investments at every link in the chain here. And some, like CD Projekt Red, are making decisions unfavourable to the spread of AI in creative industries.
I don’t think AI is going to put writers out of a job. The vast majority of us are already out of a job. Tech bros claiming to have made a programme that can do what we do, and expecting us to be pleased about it, is just the latest in a long line of insults, and far from the worst.
I say ‘far from the worst’ because I don’t think these AI tools are about to revolutionise the publishing industry, any more than they have revolutionised any of the other things they were supposed to revolutionise. It will mess with a lot of people’s livelihoods and it will muddy things up for a while. But it will not be a game-changer. The wave may leave behind puddles but it will recede. So I don’t believe the tech bros’ dystopia will happen.
GenAI will probably carve out and retain certain niches, for better or for worse, in the publishing industry. But a machine can’t actually write a story. There’s a few basic category errors at work here.
Another one found in the wild. See if you can spot the warrior who has jumped 200 metres into the air.
Why can’t a machine write a story?
First, the ‘AI’ that exists today is not some sentient machine-mind (‘alternative intelligence,’ in the disappointing words of Jeanette Winterson). Maybe some day we will have that, and our android cousins will write their cyber-Iliads, which will be very cool. I’ll be the first in line. But that’s a whole different thing. I saw someone in a comment section gushing that ‘we have taught sand to dream.’ But what we have now is just glorified predictive text. Whether in written or visual or musical form, it just shows you the lowest common denominator of what’s already out there in the culture.
Second, writing is about expressing your feelings and communicating your thoughts and experiences. A computer doesn’t have these things. It can imitate the way humans express them, provided a bunch of rich people decide to devote stupendous sums of wealth to making it do so. But again it’s not the same thing.
What if the computer’s imitation gets so good we can’t tell the difference? And aren’t some human writers also basically hacks, unoriginal, etc?
First, every writer does not have to be Arundhati Roy for the point to stand that a computer can’t be Arundhati Roy. Stories are rooted in material reality and our experiences of it. No training materials or prompts can produce something like The God of Small Things, which is viscerally a story of its time and place.
Or imagine if The Grapes of Wrath had been written using pre-existing ‘training materials.’ It would have portrayed the Dust Bowl refugees as incendiary vagrant criminals and the cops as brave defenders of civilisation.
Even if the imitation seems to be perfect and seamless, the above points will tell. Stories are not pure exercises in form. They are aboutthings. The most important ones are about things nobody has written about before. Even science fiction and fantasy stories are about themes and feelings that really exist.
Instead of Steinbeck’s wonderful and evocative descriptions of the human impact of the Dust Bowl, we would get ‘Chapter 2. The Dust Bowl took place in the 1930s and was caused by a number of factors. First…’ Front cover image from 1939. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Folktroubadour
AI in Gaming
I first became familiar with the phrase ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in relation to games. AI is what tells the mercenaries in Far Cry to search the jungle for you systematically when you hide. It’s what tells the hostile army in a Total War game to oppose your cavalry with spears. AI is what’s breaking down when your little villager takes a shortcut past ten enemy catapults, or when a Nazi stands out in the middle of a Norman field waiting for you to shoot him.
You’d think GenAI would have massive applications in gaming. But so far it’s been a real damp squib in that sector.
Recently PCGamer reported on a wild example. Basically, Microsoft made a demo based on a game called Quake 2 using Gen AI. The project used three megawatts of energy – the output of tens of thousands of solar panels. All that, for what? An incoherent, uncanny experience that looked vaguely like Quake 2 and that gave players motion sickness. For context, Quake 2 (that is, a version of Quake 2 that is the full game and that actually works and doesn’t make you nauseous) was made over 25 years ago by a team of just 13 people.
Something to think about: if they had managed to remake a part of the game exactly as it was with AI, that would have been hailed as a triumph. But… Then we’d just have a game level that already exists.
How do I explain this for people unfamiliar with games?
Imagine if I rewrote one chapter of Killing Floor by Lee Child, and presented it here on The 1919 Review expecting your adulation. But in my rewrite, the names of the characters change every other paragraph, and the font somehow gives the reader a headache. I rewrote it by listing every time a particular word is used then arranging the words according to arcane predictive rules. And, somehow, it took the entire output of a nuclear plant just to power the special laptop I used to do this.
Screenshot from Deus Ex (2000), which predicted this like it predicted everything else. Ion Storm & Eidos Interactive
That’s the essence of the Quake 2 situation, as best I can explain it using books as a comparison, but to be fair (and as I’ve made clear above), GenAI has actually produced more polished results when it’s confined to text.
In both cases the same questions arise: what is the purpose of this? How can the results (good or bad or just trifling) possibly justify the expense and the effort and the pollution? Why are we all expected to indulge Big Tech even when the project into which they are pouring so much wealth is largely unnecessary where it is not actually harmful?
GenAI is in many ways like crypto: the tech bros have invented a new toy and they demand that everyone takes their toy seriously. They demand that we sacrifice the future of the planet in order to sustain their toy. This toy is at the heart of an investor frenzy. They promise that when their toy has taken over the world, it will right all the wrongs it has done along the way (crypto, we were told, will actually save energy by putting all the banks out of business, thus reducing their emissions to zero; in the same way, we are told that AI will actually come up with clever ways to save energy.)
In other ways GenAI is not like crypto. It actually has utility, even if you agree with me that this utility cannot on balance be justified. It can be a lot of fun. It can make it easier to write emails. Its potential in technical fields is an open question.
But it has no utility in writing stories or developing videogames. It’s actually difficult to wrap your head around how stupidly wasteful and contrived such projects are. Even if that wasn’t the case, and even if the results were decent, it’s not worth one single artist losing their livelihood.
‘It’s going to change everything,’ people said, and even though they said it more often with dread than with excitement, it appeared they accepted it as inevitable.
When Generative AI became headline news a little over two years ago with the launch in late 2022 of ChatGPT, it was not simply oversold. It was hyped to within an inch of its life. Two years on, it has not revolutionized the way I work or live – thankfully. I’ve read about some ways that it’s useful and a lot of ways that it’s making the world a worse place. But in this post I want to pause and give you a full catalogue of how Generative AI has actually affected my life, as a snapshot of where the AI Revolution stands from the point of view of one individual in April 2025.
Of Bots and Men
At work I use a program called Canva and in early 2023 it drew my attention to its AI image generator, which I had a great time playing around with for a while. ‘Of Mice and Men but Lenny and George are Robots’, ‘World War Two in space’ and ‘alien spaceship in County Westmeath’ were all fun. People look doughy and uncanny, and machines look like they were drawn by someone even less mechanically literate than me, and the whole thing looks like the first three results in a Google Image search have been mashed together indiscriminately. It looks as uncreative and unimaginative as it is. But it’s fun, and I could plausibly claim that it was work; I wasn’t messing around on the job, I was upskilling to rise to the occasion of the AI Revolution. It is fortunate that I had that excuse in my back pocket, because all my colleagues could see ‘battle of Stalingrad with lasers’, ‘atom bomb on Dublin’ and other brainsick adolescent creations whenever they looked at the drafts folder. All in all, I can vouch for Generative AI as a fun toy.
As an aside, in the two years since, it’s possible this tool has gotten worse. In 2023 it gave me photorealistic rusty hobo robots in a Steinbeckian dust bowl scene; today it gave me cute robot mice.
Gen AI is all about writing prompts. But two years on it feels like we humans are the ones being prompted. Tech companies are nagging us to use the AI tools they’ve spent so much money on, usually in contexts where I don’t want or need to. If I tap my phone screen the wrong way, it invites me to use AI tools to help me do internet searches. No thanks, I’m fine. Right now as I write this, over on the margin of this computer screen, WordPress is inviting me to use AI to generate a title, featured image and feedback for this post. The good people at WordPress don’t appear to understand that I’m writing because I enjoy writing.
Ned Beauman, in his 2022 novel Venemous Lumpsucker, was referring to this kind of thing when he wrote about an ‘almost libidinal desire to relinquish autonomy.’
My wife uses AI at work, for actual work. She uses it to write formal emails, and I’ve seen the results, and I think that’s a great use for these AI tools. I understand that there are other things like this, where AI can do boring jobs quickly. So as well as being a fun toy, it help you write the kind of letters there are already templates for online.
Tsunami of Slop
In fairness to Generative AI, it has significantly changed social media, in that it’s polluted my feeds with stupid, tasteless, uncanny or offensive imagery, sometimes accompanied by text riddled with inaccuracies and written in AI’s characteristic style of pseudo-intelligent noncommittal blandness. As far as I can see, two particular online constituencies have seized on Generative AI. The first group is anti-refugee protesters, who make hideous posters for their events and fake photographs to rile people up. The second group is Facebook pages about history and archaeology. They illustrate their chatbot-written posts with, say, a picture purporting to show Brian Boru at the Battle of Clontarf – but Clontarf has been transformed from flat coastal fields to high foggy crags, and Brian Boru looks exactly like the Witcher. Or a Viking ship landing on the Irish coast – in the shadow of a ruined Norman castle that couldn’t have been built, let alone fallen into ruin, for another 400 years. One image I saw in my news feed claimed to be of Dublin. The buildings and quays looked Dublinesque, but they were all in the wrong place. Now what I think is that the image was designed to provoke me into pointing out in the comments that, say, Grattan Bridge was missing, or that Bono’s hotel is upside-down. I resisted the urge but I could see that thousands of people had already commented. There is probably a whole category of AI post now that’s just correction bait. Again, AI is prompting us now, not the other way around.
It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s a good way to maximise engagement – far more effective than, for example, posting something funny or good or clever.
While all this social media stuff is ugly and tacky, it’s at least interesting, in a Black Mirror kind of way. And image generators can be fun, and it’s nice to have software that can write the less enjoyable type of email. That’s it, really.
Maybe my experience is typical of a sizeable layer of people, maybe not. But if we make a rough balance sheet of the AI Revolution based on my experience, then it definitely wasn’t worth burning all those fossil fuels for.
Tune in next week for my thoughts on the question, ‘Can a machine write a story?’ And to finish off this post, here’s a small sample of the tsunami of slop that’s come down my news feed these last two years.
Years ago I started but did not finish a Lee Child book, Killing Floor. The things I remembered most vividly from that book, more than a decade later, were the eggs and coffee. Why did I return, all these years later? A few reasons, but most of all because I wanted to see if the eggs and coffee still tasted the same.
You see, people compare Lee Child to Ian Fleming. Both phenomenally successful and violent page-turners, obviously. But the similarities run deeper. James Bond and Jack Reacher are not really about violence, or even sex. A large part of the appeal is travel, food and drink. James Bond flew to glamorous places and pickled his insides with fancy wining and dining. (I had to put down You Only Live Twice half-way through because the entire novel to that point was travelogue). Jack Reacher buses and trudges through un-glamorous places – close-to-home, bleak, dirty places – now and then dropping into a diner to order some eggs and a litre of coffee.
Now I’ve read three Jack Reacher novels in three months (that’s fast for me). Here they are, in the order that I read them:
The Midnight Line (2017), Lee Child, read by Jeff Harding (Jack Reacher finds a class ring from his officer training school in a pawn shop, and sets out on a quest to find its owner)
Killing Floor (1997), Lee Child, read by Jeff Harding (twenty years and twenty books before The Midnight Line, Jack wanders into a small town only to be arrested and accused of a murder)
One Shot (2005), Lee Child (Five people are gunned down by a sniper in a city. The man arrested for the crime asks for one Jack Reacher – who’s already on his way)
What first piqued my interest was learning that the author is actually English. So it’s an English guy writing these familiar and jaded descriptions of the underbelly of the US heartland. That adds a layer of interest to every sentence. Why is he doing this, how is he getting away with it, and how is it so good?
Child doesn’t describe the taste or texture of the eggs or coffee in pornographic detail (It’s usually something like, “He had some eggs. They were good. The coffee was good too.”) But the food descriptions still get readers in the door. Can’t explain why, but I always feel rewarded when Reacher consumes his mundane fare.
Here follow more generalisations about Lee Child based on the three books I’ve read.
There are always cars. I’m car-blind – when an author tells me what kind of car it is (“a big coup deville” or a “large domestic model” or a “tan Buick”) it means nothing to me, and I don’t know what a given make or model is supposed to signify. But I know that James Bond cars are always that decade’s version of “fancy and expensive” while Reacher’s are more down-market. Reacher always borrows a few cars in his adventures and the reader gets to drive that particular car vicariously. The car stuff mostly goes over my head but I like how he drives across the States describing the natural and social scenery as he goes; transport is a medium through which to read the landscape. The circles described by irrigation booms are like marksmanship targets. A Georgia prison is described almost like the fortress of some evil sorcerer. In Midnight Line a truck driver briefly becomes a laconic therapist to Reacher.
Reacher always finds a way to have sex without it seeming shoehorned in. It might be central, it might be a sub-plot or it might be a coda, but it’s got to be in there. Reacher manages this while clearing a low bar that James Bond doesn’t: he’s not awful to women. He actually likes them, without a hint of contempt, and they like him.
This is good going for Reacher, when you consider that he regularly goes three or four days without changing his underpants (but we are assured that he uses “a whole bar of soap in the shower,” a defense which I find endearingly juvenile). If he carries a toothbrush, can he not carry some folded briefs and socks, maybe in his inside jacket pocket? But I guess Child is wiser not to get into all this.
I’m not a total novice to this kind of book. I’ve read Point of Impact (1993) by Stephen Hunter – the novel on which the movie Shooter is based. It’s a near-contemporary of early Lee Child and a cracking read. But the main character is an asshole. Not just to women, but also to men who talk too much (‘like a woman’).
Swagger and Reacher are both alienated from society (a character as lethal as them, while also being a boy scout, would be just unsettling). But Swagger is bitter, the distillation of a kind of post-Vietnam War resentment. Reacher starts off by telling us he’s angry that a president he didn’t vote for is cutting funding to the coast guard, an echo of his own redundancy – but he’s not bitter and he doesn’t retreat to his cabin in the mountains. He is alienated from the state and thinks the cherished myths of his society are bullshit. But he loves his country, and not in an abstract sense. He likes plenty of its people, its nature, the towns and cities and the vitality that flows on its highways. It’s a machine and he takes quiet delight in how well he understands its workings. Like what city a fugitive will be in after X number of days, what type of hotel he will stay in, and what false name he will adopt.
The stories always end with Reacher and his hastily-assembled team of allies assaulting the warehouse (or mansion or snowplough depot) where the bad guys are holed up. There will be not more than half-a-dozen action scenes before that, punctuating the story with thuds and cracks. My gruesome favourite was when he stalked five guys through a house in Killing Floor. But it has to be established that a guy is very bad before Reacher kills or maims him in a crunchy way; if the guy is only sort-of bad he only hurts him in a crunchy way.
One of the conventions of this genre relates to texture. Supposedly we are here for the murder mystery. But that’s not enough. In between the murdery and mysterious bits there are the moments where we are given access to insider information about interesting things like forgery, prescription drug abuse or guns. But even that’s not enough. In between all that, we want to follow the protagonist through a whole lot of relatable everyday life stuff like car rentals and jean sizes. The battles, puzzles and lore, in order to seem real to the reader, must be connected by a tissue made of the same stuff as our real and tangible world. The headbutts have to go crunch, and the narrator has to seem like an insider, but most importantly the eggs and coffee have to taste right.
“…throughout all the difficult days of the dissolution of Antiquity, we can trace the hard, selfish interest of a comparatively small group of families, their wealth and interest founded on land.”
-JM Wallace-Hadrill, The Barbarian West: The Early Middle Ages AD 400-1000. Harper Torchbooks, 1962
The book quoted above fell into my possession a little while ago. Knowing full-well that it was short, very broad, and decades out of date, I still read it with interest.
Men supposedly think about Rome every day. As for me, I’ve read some Robert Graves and played a lot of Total War (never as the Romans), but I’m not especially interested in togas and scutums and senators. But the stuff a little later, the great churn where the senators and castrums are turning into dukes and castles (but aren’t in any particular hurry) are more interesting to me. I like the times when years have three digits and there are a lot of things they haven’t invented yet, like chivalry, or Switzerland, or monks who had to keep it in their pants.
Today people put Rome and the Middle Ages up on a pedestal. But focus your eyes on where one is dissolving into the other, and it all looks more accidental and contingent, and you start learning things, often things you don’t know what to do with, facts you don’t know where in your brain to file.
I read indiscriminately about late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and every so often I’m going to be posting about what I’ve learned. I might criticise what I wrote here in a future post when I read something else; or someone in the comments may have something to say. No worries. So here are some interesting things I found out from Mr Wallace-Hadrill and his book The Barbarian West.
Huns riding over the horizon. The featured image is a screenshot I took on Rome: Total War – Barbarian Invasion (2005), probably the first cultural text about this period that I stumbled upon.
Did ‘barbarians’ actually sack Rome? (p 25-27)
I’ve seen the paintings. I’ve played the videogames. I grew up with a vague sense that there was a day when a horde of savages broke into Rome and burned a lot of nice buildings and murdered a lot of cultivated people, after which there was no more Western Roman Empire and Rome itself was finished as an imperial city.
Wallace-Hadrill says that the Goths took Rome in 410 CE, but did not actually sack it. They wanted food and land, and had no incentive to sack the city. It was back in Roman hands soon after. In 456 there was a serious sack of Rome – not by a nomadic horde, but by the powerful kingdom the Vandal invaders had established in North Africa. It was a sack, but it wasn’t the end of the Western Empire. That didn’t come until 476 and the overthrow of the last Western Emperor by one of his own Hunnic generals, Odoacer.
So the image of ‘barbarians’ sacking Rome doesn’t really convey how it all went down. Both Roman and invader by and large preserved Roman laws and institutions and even language – Latin itself had split into the dialects that would become French, Spanish and Italian before the fall of the Western Empire.
The later Magyar invaders, it is argued, did more damage in Western Europe than the Huns, while the twenty-year attempt by the Eastern Roman Empire to reconquer Italy brought about more destruction than the Huns, the Goths and the Lombards.
The Roman Empire did not fall because of ‘decadence’ (p 10-13)
Why did Rome fall in the first place? On the internet and occasionally in print, I’ve seen people blame it on too much partying, too much sex, too many feasts, orgies, etc. Too much dole. Too much immigration. ‘Weak men create bad times’ etc, etc. If the commentator even notices the gap of centuries between supposed cause (vague ‘decadence’) and effect (fall of Rome), he is not remotely embarrassed by it.
Ugh. Look at it. So decadent. Again from Rome: Total War
Wallace-Hadrill sums up the 4th-century crisis of the Roman Empire in a few paragraphs. In that century, land was falling out of cultivation in all provinces, a sure warning of the collapse to come. Why?
The most striking point is that the people themselves were driven to revolt by intolerable conditions. We have slave revolts and disaffected farmers turning to “mass brigandage.” Later in the 5th century we have a Roman leader, Aetius, actually allying with the Huns to crush a massive popular uprising in Gaul (Aetius at other times allied with Goths against Huns and with Huns against Goths).
Farms had fallen behind because the whole system rested on enslavement, which held back new inventions and kept agriculture primitive. So from its backward agricultural economic base, the Empire couldn’t pay for its legions or for the palaces and luxuries of its ruling class. The vast external border was too expensive to defend properly. The expense was not just in money, because war casualties and conscription drained the labour force.
All in all, we get a picture of a system that has been pushed far past the limits of its own rules. Its drive to conquer others has led to overstretch and its reliance on enslaved people has led to stagnation. It’s not that the Roman ruling class ‘abandoned their virtues’ or that ‘good times created soft men.’ The problem was that the Roman landlords stayed true to their supposed ‘virtues,’ ie, to a system built on enslavement and conquest, even when it had ceased to deliver the goods on its own terms.
Western Christianity started out as African Christianity (p 14-15)
At first, Christianity didn’t take off in the Western Roman Empire. The aristocrats remained pagan; it was artisans and bourgeois in cities like Milan and Carthage who turned to Christianity. In the East, it was closely associated with the Emperor and with the state. What eventually spread in the West was a version of Christianity that took shape in the Roman provinces of North Africa, a more strict interpretation that defended spiritual power against secular power, ie church from state.
The early Catholic church is full of surprises (p 48-52)
Early Christianity is a bit surprising. The first monastic community at Monte Cassino in the 6th Century was disciplined, but not ascetic. They all had wives and children. Rather than a place of quiet contemplation, it was a kind of bunker in a country torn by wars and plagues. As I said, this period is interesting to me because there are little surprises that I’m not sure what to do with.
Here he appears in a different light. Presiding over a period of chaos, war and plagues, Gregory brings in a system of expensive and effective poor relief. “The soil is common to all men,” declared Pope Gregory. “When we give the necessities of life to the poor, we restore to them what was already theirs – we should think of it more as an act of justice than compassion.”
Couldn’t have put it better myself. I’m nearly tempted to let him off the hook for the ‘Not Angles, but Angels’ thing.
Romans, again from Rome: Total War
Illiterate Kings
Charlemagne unified France and you could argue he founded Germany. He was a lawmaker and a patron of arts and religion. He converted the Saxons to Christianity at the point of a sword. A formidable character. But here’s a humanising and poignant detail about him from page 109. Wallace-Hadrill quotes a chronicler named Einhard as he goes on about how great Charlemagne was, how generous he was to the priests and to the arts, the churches he built, the treasures he bestowed. Einhard also says that Charlemagne kept tablets and parchment under his pillows so that when he got a free couple of minutes “he could practise tracing his letters. But he took up writing too late and the results were not very good.” He was a king from a line of kings – but in this age, he never got an opportunity to learn to write. He wanted to – but he was too old when he finally got the chance, and he only got to practise in odd spare moments. Even his flattering chronicler Einhard, looking at the messy lines and errors in Charlemagne’s uncertain script, has to purse his lips and shake his head sadly.
More Huns on the move. From Rome: TW
To finish, I want to note that books like this don’t come out anymore. And that’s for better and for worse. For better, because the author can be a callous prick sometimes. The later Merovingians died young of illnesses, so they were, he says, ‘physical degenerates.’ Sorry, what? But also for worse. This book is pocket-sized, accessible, unpretentious, erudite, focused. No hype, no bloat. An expert is informing the scholar or the layperson, and Harper are taking in $1.25 into the bargain.
So, Notes on the Medieval World isn’t really a series, more a theme I’ll be coming back to between long gaps, whenever I happen to finish a relevant book. Most likely the next one will be Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism by Perry Anderson. Stay tuned to see what videogame screenshots I manage to shoehorn in.
That word gets thrown around a lot. But I’m not racist – I’m just concerned. Specifically, about other races.
Why did you delete my comments from your page? All I did was try to dox the admins. All I did was send eight links, in a row, about people of colour doing crimes. All I did was drop fifteen ‘up yours’ emojis. All I did was blame asylum seekers for local unsolved or fictional crimes.
Well, well. It seems your page is not so open or welcoming after all.
Why did you turn off comments on that post? I only left eight comments. I had at least thirty more in me.
I had grand plans.
You don’t understand the beauty of a comment thread. It’s like a game of chess where you get to ignore your opponent’s moves and just keep on making your own. The winner is whoever sticks it out longer. I had gamed out every gambit and counter-thrust in our bout. Now it will never happen.
Why do you fold so easy? Why won’t you play with me?
…What?!
Now you’ve really crossed a line. You shared a news article about someone on my side doing something bad. How do you sleep at night, making baseless accusations? You want to get your facts straight. The nerve. I want video evidence. I’ll see you in court.
I got blocked from that page! So unfair!
All I did was send a message saying the admins were freaks and degenerate scum.
All I did was call refugees an invasion,
say that someone should burn down their homes,
and predict that they would be hunted down and beaten.
My expressions of glee were only implicit.
Please unblock me. Let me comment on your posts. All I did was ask if the admins were Jews.
And you couldn’t even answer that simple question!
Guess I struck a nerve.
Sad!
They’re afraid of the truth. They hate free speech. They refuse to let the people have their say. The facts don’t suit their agenda.
I’d even go so far as to say that they don’t appear to want to spend
A thing I’ve come to realise from writing this blog is that it’s not so easy to write about things that are really good. I wrote brief things on Andor and the new Dunemovies because brilliance speaks for itself and I don’t go in for gushing. It’s much easier to write about something you hate. Look how much I wrote on Antony Beevor’s Russia. It’s easier, and often it’s right and proper, but it’s negative and unhealthy.
The best thing is to talk about something of ambiguous quality. Something lots of people love, that you have big problems with, or something nobody gives a damn about but that you really like.
For example, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun.
In Part 1 I talked about the themes of Tiberian Sun (TS): its semi-accidental relevance in terms of ecology, and the dead-end politics of its very literal “end of history”. But on its face it is a story about a struggle between two magnetic characters, Anton Slavik (Frank Zagarino) and Michael McNeil (Michael Biehn).
Slavik and McNeil
Most people find that playing as the villain leaves a bad taste in the mouth. TS gets around this in clever ways. Anton Slavik is a high-ranking officer in the service of a ruthless totalitarian cult. But when we first see him, he is about to be executed as a traitor. So when we first see him, he’s a victim, he’s vulnerable, and we side with him instinctually.
Our identification with Slavik deepens as the story gets into gear. He escapes in a tense action scene, and soon we realise that his accuser, General Hassan, is the real traitor. It doesn’t matter a damn that Nod are evil; we root for real Nod over fake Nod. Our instinct for lesser evilism runs that deep. And when we see a genuine injustice being done on a complete prick, we extend the prick a partial forgiveness.
RIP James Earl JonesSlavik burrowing in the crust of the Earth……and McNeil soaring through the stratosphere.
Slavik continues to command our respect, though not our affection, as his story unfolds. His overlord, the Nod prophet Kane (Joseph David Kucan), is a gloating and showboating kind of villain, video-calling his enemies just to mock them and quote Shakespeare at them before he blows things up. Slavik, by contrast, has a restrained and ultra-disciplined kind of fanaticism. He is ruthless, decisive, humourless.
Slavik and Oksana
His second-in-command is Oksana (Monika Schnarre). This is strictly a story for adolescents, and any intimate relationship between the two remains implicit. Oksana herself is a true believer, but allows her personal prejudice against “shiners” (mutants, AKA The Forgotten) to get her worked up. She serves as a foil to Slavik: in her light we can see more clearly that he does what Kane commands but without special rancour. This is not from lack of enthusiasm, but because such loss of control would be unbecoming. He only betrays emotion when we see in his eyes, to quote Liam O’Flaherty, “the cold gleam of the fanatic.”
Slavik’s GDI counterpart McNeil is more of a standard game character. He’s cocky but easy to like in spite of this. He has enough humility that later he learns a grudging respect for the mutants. An embrace is as far as him and the mutant commando Umagon get with each other on screen. Umagon and co even get McNeil to entertain doubts about his superior officer General Solomon (the late and celebrated James Earl Jones), who also harbours prejudices against ‘shiners.’
McNeil learns a grudging respect for the mutants. This unnamed mutant commando has just helped him blow up a bunch of crucial Nod power plants.
Why am I going on about Slavik and McNeil? Because TS is different from every other C&C game in this respect: it actually has protagonists.
How every other C&C title works is, in between each mission, some great actor like Michael Ironside or Grace Park turns to the camera and explains the plot with a straight face. Like: “Well done, commander. Roderick Spode and his Blackshorts are on the run. But we’ve just received some troubling news. The Anarcho-Aztecs have launched a full-scale invasion of Andorra. Thankfully, we have a new prototype anti-gravity device that should prove useful. Come on through to the lab, commander. Allow me to introduce you to Sir Isaac Newton…”
(Incidentally, my phone autocorrected Michael Biehn’s surname to ‘Biden.’ Jesus wept. Imagine him giving you a C&C mission briefing: “Let me tell you something, Mack… You did a good job with the uh, the Presinald Trunt, on the little battle fella…”)
Out of all of C&C, only in TS is “the commander” of each faction given a name and a face. Now that’s a risky choice because in trying to make a movie rather than a set of briefings, TS’s developers risk being ‘cringe.’ It is visibly low-budget and Bowfinger-esque in places, but all in all it turns out much better. The player is a third-person observer of a drama. There are human stakes to the missions. TS doesn’t have an Oscar-winning screenplay by any means (I think it accidentally stole the line ‘Get me McNeil’ from a parody movie featured in The Simpsons) but it engaged me in the story far better than any other game in the series. That is because the expensive professional actors were talking to each other, not to me. Sparks fly when Kane and Jones’ General Solomon confront one another on video calls.
No other C&C title, before or since, did this. So once again, TS stands out. Before I actually replayed it, I had the vague impression that TS was guilty of ‘taking itself too seriously.’ Not a bit of it.
Nod troopers in a computer-animated cutscene
The story is told through three media:
Live action (or full motion) video – the bits with Michael Biehn and James Earl Jones, which we’ve just talked about.
Computer-animated videos, not in the game engine, showing 3d clips of the various weapons and unit types in action in the game world; victory and defeat cinematics.
The game itself – little guys moving around a 2d isometric map studded with structures and canyons and Tiberium fields, and lots and lots of motorway overpasses. This is where we see the environmental storytelling we talked about last week.
These three levels tie in together really well. The 2d isometric world, we understand, is only a representation of the real world. We’re at one remove. The action and dialogue clips supply a taste of what it ‘really’ all looks like, how it feels to be in this world, and our imagination does the rest.
Tiberium Wars and Kane’s Wrath have better graphics. They look great. But they lose this power of suggestion, the way these three levels of storytelling stimulate the imagination in TS. We don’t just play on the screen. We play in our imaginations, in the gap between the game’s now-primitive graphics and what this world would really look like.
Gameplay: This land was not made for you and me
We haven’t talked about the experience of actually playing TS. Well, if you’ve played one C&C title you have a pretty good idea what all the others are like. But here as elsewhere this game just feels subtly different.
Tiberium Wars and Red Alert 3 are fast-paced games. Each map feels like an arena, even the bigger ones. Turtling is usually punished; momentum and initiative are key. If you spend five minutes exploring, if you take an eye off your production queues, then before you know it some tank is going to be smashing in the garage door of your con yard.
Fast-paced is what they were going for, and it’s well-executed. But TS has something else, which I like better. It has empty space.
It has deserted plains and desolate canyons that lead nowhere. It has space, free uncertain space that might or might not have enemies in, and you won’t know until you send in a couple of buggies. There are no bright objective markers on the map; you’d better just figure out where those enemy SAM sites are the old-fashioned way, by sending out some guys who might get killed. This land was, emphatically, not made for you and me, which underlines the theme of the environment being indifferent to humanity. It makes the factions and the war they are fighting seem small in the grand scheme of things. This is in harmony with the game’s general vibe of being less gung-ho and more reflective than the average run of C&C.
(Going back to the cutscenes for a moment, the Nod ones start with a horribly realistic-looking shot of a dead Nod soldier, his helmet and the face under it both smashed. See what I mean? Less gung-ho, more reflective.)
And what is more, it slows the game right down. Other C&C games have an element of frenzied button-mashing and horrible meat-grinder combat where you produce wave after wave and send them out to be slaughtered. In TS, defence systems are solid and turtling is as good a strategy as any. While you hold the line, you explore, probe, experiment with different unit types, advance through trial and error, and by degrees refine your strategy, which may be very different from someone else’s. The final Nod mission, which involves setting up three massive missile launchers in enemy territory, is a fine example. There are several approaches to the main enemy base. I went in a roundabout way, battering through with rocket motorbikes, flattening a quarter of the base and bypassing the rest. I could have done it in a range of other ways, but I felt proud of the plan which I figured out and executed. Another good example would be the GDI mission where the enemy is launching poison gas missiles at you every five minutes. You have to choose wisely where to set up your base – it has to be somewhere you can spread it out, or each missile strike will be devastating. The challenge is usually not to fight a meat-grinder war of attrition, but to crack some seemingly impregnable fortress. What develops is an engrossing game of twelve-dimensional rock, paper, scissors as you figure out just the right moment and location to send in your armour, your air force, your artillery, your infantry.
The final GDI mission requires you to land infantry on an island, without air or armoured support, to finish off the final Nod base
There are other neat little things. If you fight in woodland, the trees catch fire and the fire spreads and hurts nearby units. The Nod artillery makes craters that are actually depressions in the landscape, not just cosmetic scars. Careful where you put your flame tanks; they will incinerate your own guys if they are standing in the wrong place. These neat little things were abandoned in subsequent C&C titles.
It is annoying, of course, to be limited to a production queue of just five units. Until it isn’t. You get used to it, and you realize that it has freed you up to really think about what you’re building. Armies stick to a manageable size and you have an incentive to preserve them. The five-units thing is a limitation which in effect frees you up.
Conclusion
What I like best is writing about something that you both love and hate – or that you simply feel others have overpraised or over-criticised. It’s satisfying to identify where the good and bad sides of a thing fit together like yin and yang, when the great and the gammy mutually constitute each other, when you couldn’t have the one without the other. It’s equally satisfying to talk about excesses and excrescences, unforced errors and unexpected flashes of brilliance. Best of all when the thing you’re talking about is not ‘high culture’ by any definition, but a vulgar-arsed text that was consumed by tens of millions of people even as it went completely unnoticed in newspapers and academia.
I haven’t done justice to the fact that TS is full of destructible bridges and overpasses. It was a new feature that they were excited about, and they milked it.
Such a text is Tiberian Sun. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was experienced by more people in its day than many earnestly and widely reviewed Oscar-nominated movies of the same era. The kids playing it then, aged in or around thirteen, are in their thirties and forties now, voting and operating forklifts, approving loans and being approved for loans, or not, and having kids and colonoscopies. Grown-up stuff, far away from the visceroids and Tiberium fields. These posts on Tiberian Sun are for those people, and I hope it has given them the satisfaction of excavating long-neglected recesses of their own minds.
We’ve got a guest post for you today, a review of Netflix’s Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance by freelance writer Charlie Jean McKeown.
Stories and machines are ultimately driven by people, yet Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance lacks the personality needed for the gritty mecha war drama it tries to be. Since its 40th anniversary, the Gundam franchise has been boasting ambitious projects like SEED Freedom (2024) in theatres, Witch from Mercury (2023) on TV, and in gaming Gundam Evolution (2022). (i )
This new Netflix series follows Zeon soldiers- the usual antagonists- in the closing months of the ‘One Year War.’ It’s an attempted love letter for Gundam fans, with a touching homage to the original 1979 show in its opening titles and what must have been a laborious effort to give the classic mecha designs such glorious detail. However, Requiem has little identity of its own; it has little to offer old fans and nothing accessible for new ones. More disappointingly, it does open up genuinely interesting themes which could have given the show some life if they were navigated by decent characters.
Requiem actually inverts some of Gundam’s most central themes; empathy becomes vengeance, and our protagonist is an enlisted mother rather than the usual child soldier. ‘Time’ is not a new theme for the franchise but had never received the same attention it enjoys here albeit with some overly-obvious motifs. The survival element of other Gundam series is heightened in Requiem too, as we watch the losing side struggle against a war-winning weapon. These themes, though, are only minimally engaged with. While one could blame this on the many action scenes, Gundam has always used battles to deepen its narratives rather than merely embellish them. Furthermore, Requiem still has plenty of peaceful moments in its three-hour runtime. The fault is really found in the show’s repetitive exposition soaking up what should be time spent on challenging characters so that they may develop and investigate these concepts.
All of this culminates into the most disturbingly mishandled theme of Requiem: nationalism. Mirroring the Cold War narrative of Nazi Germany (ii), Zeon had always been presented as an evil fascist regime with ordinary soldiers fighting for their homes. Interestingly, the One Year War – the definitive conflict of the franchise – is renamed here as ‘the Revolutionary War.’ Is this how the fascist Principality of Zeon sees itself? Do they view the One Year War the way Confederates saw the American Civil War? It’s a fascinating angle to investigate. However, it feels like Requiem takes up a ‘both sides matter,’ approach, with no real discussion of Zeon’s war crimes (wiping out half the Earth’s population, for instance). Instead, our apolitical protagonist is “just following orders.” While her final monologue is clearly intended to convey a lesson she learnt, it gives us a rather warped justification for continuing to fight under a swastika-esque banner.
Banner of the Principality of Zeon
While the writing is poor, Requiem’s establishing shots want you to know money and effort went into making them. Requiem is Gundam’s first CG animated production since MS IGLOO (2004), and the improvement in quality is staggering. By tightening their dimensions, the old mecha designs remain credible in today’s science fiction scene while the body language of these giants conveys a surprising degree of emotion. The facial animations are unfortunately less expressive, and to come across they often rely on the wonderful new soundtrack provided by award-winning composer, Wilbert Roget II. Netflix’s first Gundam production does look lovely as a whole, but its writing encourages little confidence in the live action film they announced in 2018. I doubt Requiem will see a second season, which is a terrible shame given its potential; if the writers could make some course-corrections in a new season and rummage through those ideas they raised, then Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance could be forgiven for these first six dismal episodes and actualise its own distinct identity.
(i) While Evolution was closed down in a year, it gave Overwatch 2 a little competition in the hero-shooter market before collapsing under its embarrassing micro-transactions. (ii) A narrative, it should be noted, now being revised by historians who are acknowledging the Wehrmacht’s complicity in war crimes.
The 1919 Review 
