Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #212

by TTA Press Authors

  "Do you? Do you, any of you, have any idea what you're doing here? With your little puzzlebox god?"

  "You shouldn't say that. People here take that very seriously.” He ran a finger down the edge of his robe. “I take it very seriously."

  "I've picked up on that.” The girl's attitude had changed completely. She stood upright, her wide eyes flat and cold. Her face was a mask. “You're lucky. I'm the merciful hand of...” She smiled. “God, I suppose. There are more dangerous messengers."

  "What's that supposed to mean? Are you threatening—"

  "You've had people upriver. You've heard the stories. Did you ever wonder why the cities north of here never touch the vessels?"

  "Yes, of course. We took it as a sign of our worthiness. Our right."

  Camilla smiled and shook her head. “Of course. Grand Veridon, highest of cities. Of course."

  "You can't honestly believe they'll do it. Give it all up?"

  "They will. They must. It isn't theirs to keep, Wright Morgan. It wasn't meant for this place. If I'd known you'd been at it so long..."

  "You? If you'd known? What are you claiming, girl?” He leaned away from her, uncomfortable.

  She fixed him with a stare that was pure calculation. “We, then. You wouldn't understand the difference. Either way, you've collected our missives long enough. They were meant for another place, for a people who would understand. You wouldn't believe the mockery you've made of this place."

  "Then why? Why do the pieces all fit? Why is there a pattern if we're not meant to see it?"

  "Because there is no pattern other than your own. Not the way you've put it, at least.” Cam dusted off her hands, where the grease from the cogs had made her fingers shiny. She gave the empty cart a childish push, watched as it rolled across the room and bumped into Elder Hines's vacant chair. “They've had their time. Let's go."

  Cam took Wright Morgan's hand and led him, numb and quiet, out of the room. They walked together down the hallway. All around them, in the distant halls of the church, voices and heresies were being raised.

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  The heart of God was loud at their approach. Every Wright and Elder was present. Most of them were yelling. They drowned out even the ratcheting thunder of the Column Prosperous. Cam and Morgan entered, and there was silence. Everyone turned to them.

  "You've come to assist.” Cam nodded in satisfaction. “You are here to comply. Good."

  "Devil!” Ganthony howled and shook his fist. His tiny face was twisted in hate. “Get out of our God!"

  Cam sighed and raised her hands. “This isn't your choice to make, Elder. It's been, I don't know, whatever you call it. Decreed. From on high. I am your angel of deliverance, old man."

  "Quiet!” Ganthony's voice was now a low rumble, building on itself as he went, ending in a shout. “Lying, deceitful child. You won't have it. This is our house, our church. Our pattern. Get out.” A tight knot of Elders and Wrights joined him, their hands curled into fists. Elder Hines threw himself in front of the crowd.

  "Stop it! Stop all of this. Ganthony, Phan, hold back. The girl has a right to speak, wherever she's from. And the truth of that will come out."

  "I passed your test, Elder. Was that not enough for you?"

  "Tests do not permit blasphemy, child.” Ganthony strained against Hines's outstretched arm. “They do not give you a holy writ."

  Cam let her shoulders slump. Morgan stepped up and put his hand on her back. The skin was cold.

  "Enough. You must give this back. Do you understand? It must be taken apart and returned to the river.” She raised her head, motioned to the whirling murals, the huffing boilers. “It is not yours."

  "And a child, a girl, will not take it from us. Not with some clever tricks and—"

  "A sign. That's all you get.” Cam straightened up. Morgan, with his hand on her back, felt things slip, shift. Her skin became forge hot. He stumbled back.

  Camilla slumped over and let out a long breath, an exhalation that seemed to start in her heels and travel up and out. It emptied her of everything Morgan recognized from his week spent caring for the little girl she had been. Her face slackened, her eyes died, the blush of her cheek frosted over. She straightened again, and grew.

  It started with her face. She looked up to the ceiling and the plates of her face separated, like the parts of a complicated mask coming apart. A crown of iron circled her head and her hair took on whip-wire life. The lashes of her eyes fanned open into metal leaves. Her teeth and tongue disappeared in puzzlebox trickery.

  The rest of her evolved with clockwork precision. Her arms and torso scissored open, got longer and thinner. Her robe tore, but beneath there was nothing but cold porcelain and metal. Her skin had frozen, slid aside and shuffled away, to reveal chain and darkness.

  She rose up and cast her arms wide. Her back opened and unfolded, fans within fans clacking apart, cogs sliding in place and telescoping. They became wings with sharp iron talons and impossibly thin feathers of milky white porcelain, translucent. She stood before them, exultant.

  "There are darker angels,” she whispered, and her voice was the sound of scissors scything closed.

  The Wrights and Elders fell back, Morgan on his knees, Ganthony and Merril covering their heads and crying out. She towered over them now on thin piston legs. Her eyes flashed with heat.

  "This is your sign. This is your message. I come to you from the mountain of your God. This house must fall. These things, all of them, must be returned to the river."

  There was silence. Even the steady boilers and cogs seemed to pause in their cycles, waiting for one of them to speak. They cowered in their robes. The men hid among the machinery of their God, and waited for someone, anyone, to act. To appease this vision. Finally, it was Morgan.

  He stood up and placed his hand on Camilla's quivering wing. The metal veins were warm. She flinched away, then loomed over him.

  "Wright Morgan. The mantle of your God is upon you. Will you return to him what you have taken, the puzzles that you have waylaid and misused?” Camilla's voice was hollow.

  Morgan lifted a shaking hand, wrapped it around Camilla's arm. The exposed machinery of her transformation bit into his fingers, drawing blood.

  "I cannot,” he whispered and closed his eyes. It was, he realized, all true. She was from the Mountain, from the heart of God. It was true, and this must all come down. Wright Morgan felt his life empty out, saw the church barren, clean. Simple. “I won't.” He turned to his fellow Wrights, to the Elders on their knees, then threw both arms around the risen girl's waist and knocked her to the ground.

  Merril and Paulus, Hines and Ganthony and Phan and all the rest. They stood up. They anointed their hatchets in oil. They didn't waste a sliver of what God had given to them. His servants.

  Copyright © 2007 Tim Akers

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  [Back to Table of Contents]

  MUTANT POPCORN—Nick Lowe's Regular Review of the Latest Films

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  Tales from Earthsea missed its moment twenty years ago, when Hayao Miyazaki proposed a film of the original trilogy as the followup to Studio Ghibli's debut release Castle in the Sky. Knowing nothing of anime, Le Guin declined, and Miyazaki made My Neighbour Totoro instead while Le Guin went off and did a Foundation number on herself with the revisionist Tehanu. When she finally saw and fell in love with Totoro a decade later, she offered the rights to Miyazaki, by then busy with Spirited Away; but by the time that was out, there were not only two more Earthsea books, but inconvenient competition from the legendarily awful 2004 Hallmark TV version, so that Miyazaki chose to take over the direction of Howl's Moving Castle instead as his swansong before the most serious of his periodic attempts to retire from filmmaking. Le Guin was persuaded to let Miyazaki's son Goro make the Earthsea film, in the belief that Miyazaki senior would be retired but involved; but the old control freak found himself unable to endure such a role, and
the tension erupted in a startling denunciation by Goro of his workaholic father's failures to his family, while the elder Miyazaki came storming out of retirement to make his goldfish movie Ponyo on a Cliff.

  Expectations of Goro Miyazaki's Tales from Earthsea have therefore been understandably cautious. It was made, at worrying speed, by a studio secondary-marketing suit who had not only never written or directed but had never even worked in animation. Japanese reaction to its release last summer was mixed, and it took home a punnet of local Razzies, including worst director and worst film. Le Guin herself was diplomatic, but dismayed at the mangling of her plot and characters to the detriment both of the logic of the story and of some of the series’ key values; in particular, she was aghast at the use of violence both as a narrative value and as a means of resolving conflict.

  So it's rather a relief to find that Tales from Earthsea is for all its fumbles a moving, atmospheric, tonally authentic and often ravishingly beautiful love-letter to the books. Despite the minimal animation and often impressionistic backgrounds, it looks and feels utterly like Earthsea, with its wide starlit skies and background horizons of shoreline. Confusingly, Tales from Earthsea is the one book left untouched. The unspeakable Hallmark version ("Are you having one of your visions again, Ged?") contented itself with butchering the first two books, leaving the Ghibli team first pick of the magnificent but distinctly less commercial Farthest Shore and the three variously problematic afterthought volumes; so what the film does is to fold key elements of Tehanu and a glimpse of The Other Wind into the plot of The Farthest Shore, with Wizard and Tombs more lightly, though pointedly, alluded to in the service of a sense of depth and backstory. Hayao Miyazaki's Shore-influenced 1983 manga Shuna's Journey is credited as an additional inspiration, and the echoes of Miyazaki senior are sometimes disconcertingly strong, as in Cob's henchmen's resemblance to the air-pirates from Castle in the Sky; but there's also a lot of disarmingly open homage to Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata, particularly his Little Norse Prince and the organic-farming parts of Only Yesterday.

  This composite sourcedness is important, because simply as an adaptation of The Farthest Shore it makes some very odd choices, beginning with the elimination of the Farthest Shore in both its geographic and its eschatological manifestations. Bizarrely for an Earthsea film, the action is almost entirely landlocked, with Cob's lair and Tenar's farm both relocated to Wathort from their opposite ends of the archipelago, and the entire quest spent tramping across a single island. The second-greatest of all fantasy maps, and the sense of world and place it underpins, is never even seen; instead, we have a heroic trudging movie in the tradition of Fellowship and Eragon. The climax in the Dry Land, seed of the two further novels, is replaced by a swordfight over the girl with a black slime monster atop a collapsing tower: a prime example of what Le Guin's stinging foreword to Tales of Earthsea termed the “commodified fantasy” whose values the series implacably rejected. Cob himself is unhappily visualised as a kind of glam Voldemort, and Orm Embar is booted out entirely in favour of a quieter and post-climactic draconic money shot (the one from the poster art) calculated to baffle anyone slow to accept the later novels as canon. Lines from the novel are retained, to great effect, but inexplicably not “There is a hole in the world and the light is running out of it"—which in the canon of fantasy lines to stop the breath stands only a pace or two behind “I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way."

  But if it wobbles a bit as a film of The Farthest Shore, it's rather a fine film of Tehanu, lingering boldly over the pastoral elements, and dealing delicately if elliptically with the Rule of Roke and the Vedurnan—the twin pillars of the revised mythos introduced in that novel, and of the tight retrospective trilogy constituted by Shore and its two sequels. Bringing Tenar and Therru into the earlier storyline is an elegant way to bridge the conceptual worlds of the first and revisionist trilogies, particularly given that the novels’ timelines overlap; and though stiffly paced and plotted, its uncertain storytelling and leisurely pacing make a strong cumulative statement of their own against the tyranny of facile western storytelling rhetoric. Even the minimalist, television-standard character animation so deplored by Ghibli fans has a positive part to play here. Anime is famous for its tolerance of stillness, of leaving characters and backgrounds unanimated, where Hollywood demands business; and though it takes some discipline not to chortle as Arren does the facepalm at the very moment Therru's song goes into a fourth verse when you think it's finally over, the film's visual and narrative patience make a beguiling overall case for the values of being as well as of doing. The English dialogue and dub have a few hiccups, and one has to grit teeth and get used to the pronunciations “Ark-Marge” and “Lebanon", but John Lasseter's team deserve credit for restoring dialogue as per the novel where lip-flaps permit, as well as for including full English credits. But this is Ghibli's best film by a younger director since Yoshifumi Kondo's extraordinary Whisper of the Heart, which had the unfair asset of full script and storyboards plus uncredited directorial contributions by Miyazaki himself. Goro's one serious weakness is storytelling, but he's more than earned the right to a chance to raise his game.

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  The waters return in force in Arkmage movie Evan Almighty, which offers the grim spectacle of a film you can't believe anyone ever wanted to make, at a cost nobody ever wanted to spend. What everyone thought they were ponying up for was a sequel to Bruce Almighty in which Jim Carrey's character from the 2003 vehicle got the call to build an ark with Jennifer Aniston and save, if not the world, at least the teaming of two hugely powerful comic talents. But despite the return of Carrey's regular director Tom Shadyac, both leads caught the unmistakable whiff of turkey and jumped ship, leaving rising star Steve Carell to take the bridge while the budgetary flood level inched ever closer to the symbolic $180m mark (aka One Whole Lord of the Rings).

  Like its predecessor, Evan marks a serious attempt by Hollywood to engage directly with the faith of the majority of its audience while somehow contriving to cause offence to none. In this it only partly succeeds, as even this ferociously toothless film has its gums clamped round issues of fairly huge and disturbing significance, especially now that three out of ten candidates for the Republican nomination have come out as refusing to believe in evolution. (Carell himself had to blench and wriggle when asked at a press conference whether he believed in a historical flood, chillingly aware that every possible answer would wash away huge swathes of whatever audience was left for the film.) It certainly couldn't have come up with a more topical premise than an ambitious young congressman being bothered by God with the inconvenient truth about a coming environmental catastrophe. But at the end God comes out as a climate change denier, the flood local rather than global and the result of reassuringly litigable individual misconduct, not even an act of God—so that even the responsibility for permitting the climactic New Orleans event in the heart of DC lies with a single bad-apple, corner-cutting concreteer, rather than (for example) with vehicle owners, energy consumers, and the throttlehold of the oil industry over public policy. In the end, Evan wears the robes of a film that interprets scripture on the model of filmmaking: “I think it's a love story,” is God's startling pitch of the world-cleansing deluge to Mrs Noah, who duly goes all surrendered and falls in with the patriarch's mission to finish and launch his vessel in time for his autumn release date. The Hollywood faith is that if you build it, they will laugh; but in the real world the laughter isn't with you, but at.

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  The Farthest Shore is also one of the models pilfered by Shrek the Third, in which the return of the king to restore a realm under shadow similarly takes the form of an adolescent hero-in-the-making who fulfils his calling, saves his people, and allows the series lead to retire into obscurity at the place where he began. If it's not quite as grim as Shrek II and the conceit of interpolating Shrek into The Sword in the Stone has promise, the date
d animation design, weak scatter gags, and relentless therapy scenes still carry their cumulative power to unsettle the stomach and grind jaw against jaw. Every time you feel the urge to applaud its celebration of fat ugly people, it shifts the action into a swamp of self-help: “Even my own dad didn't think I was worth the trouble"; “People used to think I was a monster, and for a time I believed them"; “Just because people treat you as a villain or an ogre or just some loser, doesn't mean you are one,” and so queasily on. And at the back of it all, as usual, is a nasty reaffirmation of class, hierarchy, and calocracy, with only the good-looking and noble-born allowed to inherit power while the green-skinned smelly proles (marry one of them and you'll turn into one, forever) retire to their swamp and breed large numbers of babies. But it's ok, because look, it's their choice. Who says fairy stories aren't like real life?

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  A much shinier sequel glides rides in with Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Unfairly derided on their first outing, the movie FF are emerging as the surprising flagbearers of a brighter, bouncier Marvel movieverse that scorns adolescent angst for a back-to-basics celebration of silver-age superhero values centred on gadgetry, good humour, and a zest for cosmic science fiction. What Surfer has going for it that no previous Marvel movie has is three absolute killer storylines from canon that knit together naturally and almost effortlessly. I powerfully remember as a child my first sight of Jack Kirby's extraordinary cover for FF 48 on the newsstand—with its characters (including the titanic Watcher) pointing out of frame and up at a vast presence manifest only as a shadow—and knowing at once that this was the single greatest issue of anything that Marvel had ever produced. The gratuitous combinatorial power-swapping is an improvement too far, and there's a small glitch in the attempt to explain why Dr Doom would want to steal the Surfer's powers when it means the entire planet's destruction by Galactus; but the bravura episode of Reed and Sue's wedding becomes in the film version an exquisitely readymade Hollywood frame for the action film in the middle. The film has dispensed with the fondly-remembered Ultimate Nullifier and the climactic panel in which Galactus recoils from a silly-looking gubbins halfway between an oilcan and a staple-gun (Kirby was never good at handheld devices), and has come up with a different way for the Torch to save humanity by a transcendent burst of effort. And if the film's non-anthropomorphic Galactus is a disappointing rejection of the most sheerly Kirbyesque character design Kirby ever created, the portentous voice and vision of Smilin’ Stan and Jolly Jack at their peak is thrillingly evoked in moments like the Surfer's “All that you know is at an end". It's an affecting flashback to a shiny silver era when comics were the most exciting artform of their moment, and the FF the most exciting comic of comics.