| To send books for review in this column
email Jacqueline Lichtenberg,jl@simegen.com
for snailing instructions or send an attached RTF file. Find these books. Find TV fandoms online Ghost Story by Jim
Butcher, RoC HC, August 2011 “With great power comes great responsibility.”
All geeks know that quote.
If you don’t, quick run to Amazon and get the Spiderman movies, all
of them. Our “action heroes” generally illustrate the use and
abuse of physical power. But
you and I know that the real power in this world, and in life, is not at all
material, physical, or even financial.
The power that directs the course of events in a
single life, a family’s or community’s life, or the whole civilization’s
life, is unseen and unseeable.
It is a force that comes from outside physical reality, and yet is an
integral part of it. That is the force which drives the “plot” of all
movies and stories. A “plot” is
the sequence of events that starts with a decision or inadvertent but
decisive action, which causes the reaction, that causes the next event.
It’s a cause-effect chain, and it works in stories because it is a
portrait of real life. In life, you flounder among hundreds maybe thousands
of cause-effect chains, some started thousands of years ago, some started
yesterday, some by you, mostly by others, or groups of others.
Life is a pea soup of independent and interlaced cause-effect chains. Your life had a “start” point, (a natal chart) and
has an “end” point – though the natal chart doesn’t register it usually.
Any life is dotted with traumas, spiritual deaths and rebirths, mine
fields you walk through without an explosion, and explosions that throw you
into a new life or beyond life.
The traumas are scheduled in the natal chart, but don’t always happen, and
the odds of the outcomes are pretty clear in a natal chart, but the exact
outcome is as elusive as the ubiquitous Higgs Boson. Your freewill choices may affect outcomes, but not
the next monster to come crashing through your living room wall directed by
something with a much freer will!
Does that sound like a videogame you’ve played
recently? The reason videogames
are so popular is the way they mirror real life, making the unseen visible.
But in a videogame as in a novel or film, we look for
that satisfying ending where “justice” is served up, sometimes cold and
sometimes warm and cuddly. That
payoff moment in a story delivers the poetic justice that reaffirms our
belief that justice is built into the fabric of reality.
Most of us need that belief to continue on the path of the white
magician. But how can you sustain that belief in the face of
what comes in the news every day?
How is it that some people get so rich, while others get splashed
with a face full of muddy snow as a reward for walking to work every day,
trying to live “Green?” There are lots of books written on that, but check
out this short online article with a geek’s answer: That article describes the world as a game system, a
MUD, that’s been hacked, and how we’re the techs who have to fix that so the
users can keep playing. And
yes, I remember Captain Kirk and the Kobayashi Maru.
Keep Why Do Great Things Happen
To Rotten People? in mind as you read Jim Butcher’s latest Dresden
Files novel, Ghost Story. Ghost Story is
the 13th
novel in the Dresden files, each of which is a very tight, direct sequel.
Dresden is a “Professional Wizard” using Magick to do
the work of a “Private Eye” in Chicago, in our modern times but in a very
slightly alternate world where Magic, Demons, Vampires of various habits,
White Magicians and gray all vie for control of Chicago.
The barrier between worlds is thin there, and beings from Nevernever
interact with us. Dresden has a
real fairy godmother, second in command to Mab who wants Dresden to be her
Knight of Winter, which would be selling his soul, which he treasures. Harry Dresden tells his hard-boiled Chicago Private
Eye first-person story in his own words.
This gives us an inside view of his step by step application of a
White Magician’s morality. In
each novel, Harry’s narrowly targeted actions produce larger-than-life
results. I reviewed #11, Turncoat, in my October 2009 column
titled The Mystery of Magic: The Magician’s Apprentice.
And #12, Changes, in November 2010 in a column titled The Science of
Magic: Part V, Scalability.
Dresden Files is in e-book now: the TV Series on DVD. I urge you to study, not just read, these novels.
If you have, the following won’t seem like a spoiler.
Butcher has outdone himself with Ghost Story, and set
up a springboard into more Dresden Files stories.
Dresden, though touched early in life by Black Magic and since
tainted deeply by it, lives the life of the White Magician, guardian of
Excalibur and other Archangel Swords.
The article I pointed you to above explains why Dresden’s initiation
into the Dark makes him more qualified to handle vast White Power, not less
qualified as the White Council believes. As I read that article, I see Dresden is a MUD hacker
turned security consultant for the game designer.
And as pointed out at the end of the article, it’s all a setup.
The hacker-turned-consultant is an archetype that you
see in some TV shows like White Collar.
So you need to study The Dresden Files if you have any interest in
how Magick and Justice intertwine in this world.
In the direct prequel to Ghost Story, Changes,
Dresden sets out to rescue his daughter (a 6 yr. old child he didn’t know
existed) from the most evil killer Vampires.
Simple, little, limited objective, perfectly righteous.
In the course of helping other people along the way,
and always doing the “right” thing with the huge magical power he commands
(great power but without much fine control), he ends up with a broken back,
absolutely helpless while his daughter is going to be sacrificed in a
magical ritual to give the bad Vampires vast command in the world–with far
reaching inter-world consequences. He concocts a plan, though we don’t know all of it.
Dresden has his apprentice erase his memory so it can’t be read by
Mab, with whom he makes a trade, a deal to become her Knight if she’ll give
him the power to rescue his daughter.
He thinks he’s “playing” her.
In the course of rescuing the daughter, he has to
slit the throat of the daughter’s mother (whom he loves), to trigger the bad
Vampire group’s spell and make it backfire, wiping out (nearly) all the
killer Vampires. He uses his occult knowledge and magick to do an Evil
Deed to accomplish a Righteous Objective, after he’s sold his soul to a dark
and dangerous power. In the
last scene, he’s shot in the chest and falls into Lake Michigan.
There’s no doubt he’s dead.
That’s justice, right? We’ve admired him through 11 novels, but how can
Dresden be admirable now? Why
am I reviewing this series, demanding that you read it carefully?
Because this series, more than any other that’s come
across my desk the last few years, can bring you to conscious knowledge of
your own concept of Justice. To
wield your own power righteously, you must know where Justice comes from,
why we treasure it, what the Tarot Card Justice really means, what it means
to acquire and wield Power, what morality has to do with Justice, how we
come by our notions of right, wrong, the value of life, and the meaning of
success, wealth, possessions, Relationships.
Where does personal sovereignty and individual responsibility lie
athwart Justice, divine or poetic? Ghost Story sends Dresden’s ghost on a mission to
find his killer in order to protect 3 of those he loves most from terrible
damage, or so he’s told, and believes. It draws on all 12 prior novels (and
some of the short stories) to illustrate (with gorgeous gamesmanship) the
structure of the universe we live in, the meaning of free will and
individual power in the context of a group, and reveals what you might call
the Higgs Boson of Justice. Even if you know what the Higgs Boson, called the God
Particle, is, watch this from Fermi Labs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_HrQVhgbeo Dresden’s conversation with the archangel Uriel
reminded me of that video. Having found his killer by discovering what he’d had
his apprentice wipe from his memory, Dresden must choose between two “doors”
into his future–one dark, the other light.
He chooses to confront the consequences of his actions head on, and
ends up in the biggest, deepest, sourest pickle he has yet been in.
But if you’ve read all 12 previous books carefully, you know he knows
this is Justice. As readers, though, we also know he’ll hack the MUD
and change the world-game.
To send books for review in this column email Jacqueline Lichtenberg, jl@simegen.com for snailing instructions or send an attached RTF file.
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The Re-Readable Collection