Picking Up The Threads

Where were we? I was reading Jerry Pournelle's and SM Stirling's third Man-Kzin Wars story, "In The Hall Of The Mountain King," realizing that I had not read it before. Pournelle's and Stirling's Man-Kzin trilogy is integrated with Poul Anderson's and I will probably reread the latter next.

However, when the laptop died, I temporarily stopped reading the Man-Kzin series becaue I had stopped being able to blog about it simultaneously. Also, wanting a change of genre, I instead reread Garth Ennis' graphic series, The Boys, which ingeniously integrates the fantastic concept of superheroes into an alternative twentieth century history of American business, politics and warfare. The Twin Towers still stand but not the Brooklyn Bridge. 9/11 happened but differently.

Ennis knows his comic book stuff and his real world stuff and also writes a lot of straight war fiction. Although he presents different genres in a different medium from the different perspective of an Ulsterman living in New York, Ennis' graphic fictions are comparable to Anderson's, Pournelle's and Stirling's militray sf - and he even wrote some sf in a Dan Dare revival. Common themes are military hardware, the experience of combat and the causes of conflicts. What more could we want?

Well, I would like an end to such conflicts but even then we would still have to study and read about military history. Larry Niven's ARM are out of order trying to suppress that history. The FTL interstellar scenarios of Anderson, Niven, Pournelle etc would at least ensure that humanity can survive even when weapons can wreck worlds.

Next, we must return to the Wars Against Men.

Verbals And Visuals

Rereading a Poul Anderson science fiction novel late at night, I suddenly wanted visual as well as verbal input so I switched to rereading The Boys Vol 4, We Gotta Go Now, by Garth Ennis.

A novelist describes a scene to his readers so that we can visualise it whereas a comics script writer describes a scene to the artist so that we can see it. The same fictive process, the transmission of an image from author to reader, is mediated differently.

Occasionally, the writer is also the artist. In that case, he does not merely relate but realises the visuals of the scene or event to be communicated. In either case, whether there is a writer-artist team or a solo writer-artist, the visualising has been done for us but it is down to us to notice the details in each panel, not just to follow the narrative from panel to panel by reading speech balloons and captions. In a purely verbal medium, our attention moves continuously along the lines of the text and from page to page whereas, with graphic fiction, we need to pause in order to look as well as to read.

Returning to the novel the following day, I immediately found one of Anderson's rich descriptive passages. Two of the characters:

"...turned north into Riverside, a road cut from the left bank of the Jayin. On their right, trees screened them from view of town, a long row of deep-rooted swordleaf, preserved amidst this terrestrialized ecology to be a windbreak when tornados whirled out of the west. Opposite, the stream flowed broad, murmurous, evening ablaze upon it...On the farther shore, native pastureland rolled into blue remoteness...a peacefulness that Sparling wished Constable could have painted...Westward under a sinking Bel, a few clouds glowed orange. Elsewhere the sky stood unutterably clear." (Fire Time, London, 1977, pp. 68-69)

There is a lot more but I can't quote indefinitely. Appropriately, for the comparison that I am making between prose and graphics, one of the characters wishes for a pictorial representation.

In The Boys, we get:

beautiful pictures of Hughie and Annie naked in a field or in bed together;

a distant horizon seen through the wall-sized window of a superhero team's hovering headquarters;

an American corporate executive talking importantly into a mobile phone while driving around a golf course;

close-ups of our characters' wistful glances, enigmatic smiles, horrified stares etc;

a gallery of covers by big name comic book artists, including Dave Gibbons of Watchmen.

Far out. Vive la difference.

Meanwhile...

Building on three previous volumes, Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars is a rich sf novel. By p. 221, we have seen:

one of three new extrasolar colonies;

the system of Alpha Centauri, now filled with flying rubble from a planetary collision but still inhabited by the asteroid-dwelling Lunarians;

interactions between Terrans and metamorphs in the Inner Solar System where Earth and Moon are free from poverty and wars and there is a plan to terraform Mars;

the vast domain of the Lunarians among the planetoids and comets of the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud;

the build-up to a confrontation between the free human beings in space and the artificial intelligence controlling the utopia-but-with-remaining-alienation-and-discontent on Earth and Luna.

Meanwhile over on www.comicsappreciation.blogspot.co.uk, I have posted about Garth Ennis' The Boys and have been sidetracked into rereading that series. While reading well-drawn graphic fiction, we simultaneously follow a narrative with characterisation and appreciate visual art.

Anderson's descriptive passages always appeal to several of the senses while presenting colourful, vivid accounts of natural or exotic scenes. The latter include for example Lunarian habitats where energy and space are devoted not only to survival but also to comfort and ostentation. Readers with good visual imaginations should be able to visualise what is described and to project how it could be filmed. However, since my thoughts processes are entirely abstract, "auditory digital" in Neuro-Linquistic Programming terminology, I remain very conscious of a qualitative difference between the verbal fiction of a novel and the visual-verbal fiction of a graphic novel.