Meg is touched by darkness (132)
Larson’s basic comics-artist skills are all good: she generally composes panels well, and can guide the reader’s eye around the page. She balances lights and darks and chooses her depicted moments so as to convincingly convey the action. Her characters have wide, manga-style eyes but with actual noses and mouths and with distinct faces. Even if she’s clumsy at depicting motion, that’s not much of a problem for Wrinkle, which isn’t a fight-filled action adventure. Emotion is more important here, and Larson’s faces carry that well. She frequently adds in the little symbols that cartoonists use as shorthand indicators of emotion, but she has the skill to get by without them.
You don’t need that dagger to see that Meg is angry (41)
I’m not sure if that dagger is there for the benefit of readers less adept at reading facial expressions or if Larson included it for the fun of it. (Also, props to Larson for fully rendering Meg’s eyes and glasses. You wouldn’t believe how many modern cartoonists have trouble drawing glasses, and just drop part of the glasses’ frames out where it gets in the way of the character’s eyes.) She playfully crosses the line between depiction and representation several times in the book. On page 11, we see “wssh” lettered within a cloud, to convey the windy noisiness of a hurricane but written in script with a line that makes it seem like a part of the cloud, rather than an accompaniment. On page 191, nosy neighbors on Camazotz eavesdrop on a conversation; we see them emit word balloons containing ears, inverting the usual meaning of a word balloon to represent attention instead of speech.
Larson is good with homey, cluttered, and organic spaces—the Murrys’ kitchen and living room, the interior of Mrs Whatsit’s house, the wooded area around them are all great. But she’s weak when it comes to urban architecture—the capital city on Camazotz is less convincing than an old Star Trek set, and many of her fine details are wrong or unconvincing.
For instance, we see the Murrys’ kitchen on page 20. It’s a pleasant, inviting place. Look at that old-fashioned toaster on the counter—the Murrys even leave it unplugged when they’re not using it, like my parents used to when I was a kid! But that dog doesn’t really look like he’s lying on those tiles, and there’s no way that table will stay standing unless it’s attached to the floor.
The Murry kitchen is charming, but the details don’t work (20)
Still, these quibbles of mine are unlikely to make a difference to the book’s target audience. As a child, I didn’t notice Star Trek’s cardboard-and-balsa-wood environment; a young reader is unlikely to care about the Murrys’ kitchen table.
All in all, this is a faithful, respectful adaptation of a classic novel, with a lot of visual charm, one that occasionally makes use of the comics medium to express the fiction in ways the prose did not.
* * *
Avram Grumer lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Works Cited
Larson, Hope. “WeatherVain.” Flight volume 2. Edited by Kazu Kibuishi. Berkeley: Image Comics, 2005. 178–186.
L’Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time (1962). New York: Yearling Book, 2005.
Spaceman, written and directed by Leegrid Stevens
starring Erin Treadway; produced by Incubator Arts and Loading Dock; St. Marks Church in-the-Bowery, New York
reviewed by Aaron Grunfeld
Onstage, science fiction tends toward Flash Gordon parodies or po’-faced post-apocalyptics. But Spaceman, a short drama that played briefly in downtown New York, attempts something rare in live sf. Though it rides a rocket from Earth to Mars, it has none of the romance of Bradbury’s Chronicles or Burroughs’s Barsoom; though it’s about a mission to colonize the Red Planet, it ducks the terraforming heroics of Robinson’s Mars trilogy. Instead, Spaceman treats its audience to an evening of diamond-hard science fiction.
Playwright/director Leegrid Stevens (aka Steven Gridley) presents space travel as a journey of existential proportions. The conflicts of his drama are those of space flight: the physical and, more importantly, the psychological effects of a manned trip to Mars. With breathtaking realism, he focuses tightly on the sole crewmember of a Mars-bound space capsule: one set, one actress, 100 minutes.
After seven months alone in her space capsule, Cmdr. Molly Gennis (Erin Treadway) is nearing Mars but she’s also nearing a breakdown. Mission Control is on a ten-minute delay, a preprogrammed “mission buddy” fails its Turing Test within seconds, and the only other living thing within light-minutes is her pet plant. To fend off despair, Gennis sings her flight-check list absent-mindedly; she recounts memories to her late husband; she stares off into space; she gets into morbid depressive ruts.
With respect to action, Spaceman resembles the slower stretches of 2001 or Dark Star: interplanetary travel as dull routine in a confined space. To represent the capsule, Stevens and set designer Carolyn Mraz rigged a metal scaffold with monitors, keyboards, and hard drives. The blocky utilitarianism implies NASA’s pre-shuttle era but also visually suggests the boredom of spaceflight. Surrounding these cramped quarters is a wide expanse of darkness. Most of the stage is empty space, dark and unused, a void that underscores the astronaut’s precariousness and isolation.
That deliberately low-tech design and unbusy plotting starkly contrasts with Gennis herself, a marvelously lively character. Demonstrating extraordinary range and stamina in the role, Treadway rides a harrowing emotional seesaw while holding the audience’s focus confidently. Her performance leads the audience to experience some thrilling tensions. One such scene, maybe the show’s high point, comes in second half. Her character has inexplicably slumbered for 18 hours and now faces a psych test from Houston. Gennis barrels through it, delivering confident answers to increasingly surreal questions. Finally, she hears “We Are the Champions” and hoots in triumph.
At that moment, the audience realizes that the staging has shifted at least partly to represent the astronaut’s perspective. Gennis snaps to, horrified at her cracked psyche, then remembers that NASA can recall the capsule remotely. Should she sever her ship’s communications link so she can reach Mars, alone and perhaps deranged, or allow the mission to be aborted and return to Earth a broken failure? When she does cut the wires, she confirms her madness, but her fortitude also renders her decision heroic.
Moments like this display a confident sense of theatrical craft. Stevens draws a multidimensional character and sets up complex psychological quandaries, but he also deploys his themes deftly. His vision of space flight offers a witty critique on the nexus of science, economics, and politics. To fund the mission, NASA has arranged for sponsors to place their logos on Gennis’s flightsuit, like a NASCAR uniform. With this intrusion, isolation becomes more ambiguous, since it provides a defense against humiliation.
Spaceman especially shines, however, in its treatment of belief. Though its protagonist is a scientist and atheist who struggles with her mother’s religiosity, she’s also a young widow. Her loneliness and grief instills her expedition with a deeper resonance, turning her mission into an journey to the underworld. Take this example, a short speech which has Gennis listing nearby heavenly bodies off her computer:
Have you looked at the names of these asteroids? They’re all over the place. That was Nyx. Next up is Ishtar, then Quetzalcoatl, then Don Quixote! Get your mythologies straight, guys. Roman gods please. Jupiter, Saturn, Venus. Nice and neat. Oh, here we go. Listen to these! We got Magellan, Pocahontas, Dionysus—of course—Seneca, Nefertiti. Ha! There’s one named Pele! Uh, Krok, “semi-mythical fifth-century Slavonic prince of Bohemia.” Nice. Bruce Murray! Go ahead, Bruce, name that asteroid after yourself! Tanith—Carthaginian lunar god. Bivoj—legendary Czech hero. McAuliffe. . . .
[pause]
I know that one. Christa McAuliffe. From the Challenger.
[She looks out the window]
It’s like a graveyard out there. Dead gods and old, faded heroes. This is where they all end up. Floating tombstones. Wandering around the banks of River Styx. Som
etimes colliding. Smashing to bits. Waiting for the ferry to carry them over the black waters.
This marvelous setpiece, one of many, gives something of the flavor of Spaceman: the character’s sporting chatter with absent colleagues, her curiosity and intelligence, her genial laughter at “Bruce Murray,” her mercurial moods. Additionally, it discloses her state of mind, since her late husband, also an astronaut, died in space’s vacuum. And then under that character work lies foreshadowing and a mythic sensibility.
Stevens, Treadway, and their collaborators produced their grand, intimate drama with consummate skill. Designer Driscol Otto, for example, stripped away the lighting until the only lamp visible belongs to a spacesuit helmet that illuminates the astronaut’s face. Stevens, in addition to writing and directing, designed the show’s rich soundscape, stuffing the capsule with pings and hums. The sonic element is so artfully subtle, it’s a surprise to note that it features a dozen voice actors. Mission Control, the onboard computer, radio interviews, and messages from home: despite being effectively a one-woman show, Spaceman isn’t a monologue, and its world is rounded out well by the terrestrial characters offstage.
Perhaps it’s a flaw then that late in the show, another actor enters. The careful reader may guess this late arrival’s identity; his appearance has likely been calculated for dramatic effect, but arguably it undercuts the show’s hard-won sense of loneliness too greatly. Likewise, a chance meteorite collision violates the realistic portrait of space travel. A solar flare, later on, feels more organic to the show’s sensibility and has thematic as well as narrative effects too valuable to lose. But two moments of jeopardy gild the plot too much, since its simplicity is part of its genius. The show’s conflict is and should be almost entirely internal.
In this respect, Spaceman is a masterpiece of science fiction. It avoids the frippery of space adventure while conveying the heroism of space travel. Its blurring of objective reality with its protagonist’s mind-state lifts the show above the strained asceticism of Mundane SF, a subgenre whose rules it otherwise follows with impressive fidelity. Finally, it imparts that classic sense of wonder, marveling at humanity’s potential and the courage that drives our endeavors. This is a work of compassion, humor, and keen insight. Its simple staging should transport easily; with any luck (and extra funding), Spaceman will visit small venues and theater festivals around the US. If it should come to your city, see it.
* * *
Aaron Grunfeld lives in New York City.
Molly Gennis (Erin Treadway)
Above, Molly Gennis (Erin Treadway); below, Molly and the set of Spaceman
Read This
recently read and recommended by Richard Kellogg
The Answer by Philip Wylie
Philip Gordon Wylie (1902–1971) was one of those rare writers who was comfortable writing about a wide variety of topics. From the 1930s until his death in Miami in 1971, Wylie produced hundreds of novels, short stories, magazine articles, and philosophical essays. He excelled at writing mysteries, romances, science fiction, and exciting tales of high adventure. During his lengthy literary career, Wylie ranked among the wealthiest and most prolific authors in America.
Philip Wylie is best remembered today for his achievements in the world of science fiction—Gladiator, an inspiration for Superman, Doc Savage, and other superheroes; When Worlds Collide (1933) and After Worlds Collide (1934) (with Edwin Balmer), a gripping saga about a cosmic disaster; and The Disappearance (1951), in which males and females are suddenly and mysteriously separated from each other. Toward the end of his life, Wylie penned two futuristic stories of environmental disaster. Los Angeles: A.D. 2017 appeared in 1971 and The End of the Dream (1972) was published a year after Wylie’s death. His final two books depict a dying world and a bleak future for mankind. Wylie prophesies that our environment will be destroyed by the combination of advanced technologies and corporate greed.
Even Wylie fans, however, may be unaware that this author wrote a short novella (about 15,000 words) during the Cold War which ranks among his best efforts in science fiction. The Answer (1956) appeared initially in the May 7, 1955 issue of the Saturday Evening Post and was released in hardcover the following year. Although largely overlooked today, the fantasy was lauded by such luminaries as Bernard Baruch, Eleanor Roosevelt, Milton Eisenhower, Carl Sandburg, and Norman Vincent Peale. Wylie had previously written about the horrific consequences of nuclear war in Tomorrow! (1954). The Answer helped to further establish his reputation as “the oracle of the atomic age.”
The main character in The Answer is Major General Marcus Scott of the Eighth Air Force. He is stationed aboard the ship Ticonderoga to monitor American H-bomb testing in the Pacific. Scott is a brilliant West Point graduate who has a literary bent and likes to read Thoreau.
The bomb is dropped on the target by a B-111 in Operation Bugaboo of Test Series Avalanche. The mission appears to be a success but General Scott is informed that the blast may have caused a casualty on nearby Tempest Island.
Upon arriving on the island by helicopter, Scott is horrified to discover that the “casualty” appears to be a beautiful angel. The body had been found by Reverend Sims, a missionary on the island, and his son, Ted. The Reverend Sims, in a state of hysteria, asserts that the corpse is that of Gabriel, the angel of the Lord. Sims is convinced that the atomic testing will bring about the end of the world.
Young Ted actually witnessed the angel’s fall to earth. The boy reports that before its death the angel was crying and saying, “I was a little too late.”
General Marcus Scott, fearing universal panic will result from this tragic event, contacts the president of the United States. Arrangements are made to fly the angel’s body to Washington aboard a B-111 aircraft. However, the plane never reaches San Francisco and is presumed to have crashed into the ocean.
Shortly after that bizarre episode at Tempest Island, the Russians test their own nuclear devices in the wilds of northern Siberia. After one of the bombs detonates, a rural peasant discovers the remains of an angel near the target area. Russian soldiers immediately shoot the peasant, and the Russian premier is summoned from Moscow to inspect the angel. The Russian leader is terrified that public knowledge of the angel could inspire a religious revival and lead to the end of communism. Accordingly, he orders that the angel’s body be destroyed by attaching it to the next bomb scheduled for testing.
The story reaches a stunning conclusion when General Scott returns to Tempest Island at Christmas to prepare for additional atomic tests. He encounters Ted Sims, the son of the clergyman, and learns that Ted’s father has gone insane. The mission school on the island will soon be closed. Ted finally admits to the general that the angel was delivering a small golden book to the earth when it was knocked out of the sky by the bomb blast. The boy had concealed the book under a rock with plans to later retrieve and sell it.
Ted agrees to take the general to the spot where he had hidden the precious book. The book contains only one message written over and over again in many languages. The message reads simply “Love one another.”
According to Truman Keefer’s 1977 Twayne volume on Wylie, the inspiration for The Answer came suddenly to Wylie while on a visit to Colorado in 1954. He was fascinated by the premise that an atomic explosion could actually blow an angel right out of the sky. Would the destruction of an angel cause the superpowers to suspend their nuclear arms race? In a state of excitement, Wylie returned to his summer home in Rushford, New York, and wrote the entire story in only two days.
It is somewhat ironic and counterintuitive that Philip Wylie chose to write a powerful fable about the existence of angels. After all, he was the iconoclastic social critic who attacked the churches and questioned religious dogma in books such as Generation of Vipers (1942). Wylie was never considered to be a friend of religious institutions.
However, it may be relevant to note that Philip’s father, Reverend Edmund Wylie, was a prominent Presbyterian minister and a staunch
prohibitionist. Philip, whose beloved mother, Edna, died when he was only five, found his father to be cold and distant toward his children. Even though Philip was estranged from his father and his father’s church for much of his adult life, all those early years of church attendance and Bible reading must have made some impact on his belief system. In The Answer, he considers the possibility of angels appearing on earth and stresses the role of spiritual values in reducing the risk of nuclear war.
In sum, The Answer is a one of Philip Wylie’s most eloquent works of speculative fiction. He points out that technology by itself cannot resolve all human problems. Scientific advances—especially in military weaponry—can go terribly wrong when humans take action without using such basic emotions as tolerance, compassion, and love. The best solution to resolve conflicts is quite obvious: “Love one another.”
Philcon, November 2012, Cherry Hill, New Jersey
Gardner R. Dozois
Lobby, the morning after
Lobby, the night before
The Hopes and Fears of All the Years
“Christmas,” said Doctor Drinkwater as his red-cheeked face sped smoothly toward Smoky’s, “is a kind of day, like no other in the year, that doesn’t seem to succeed the days it follows, if you see what I mean.” . . .
The New York Review of Science Fiction Page 6
