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ReReadable Books

(July 2008)

"Pluto: Melodrama Unleashed Part I"

By

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

 

 

 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 Godfather I, II, III DVD Paramount, 2001

You’ve Got Mail Warner Home Video, 1999

High Deryni by Katherine Kurtz, reprint Ace HC Dec. 2007

Airs and Graces by Toby Bishop, Ace pb Jan. 2008

Shades of Dark by Linnea Sinclair, Bantam August 2008

Audacious by Mike Shepherd, Ace pb, Nov. 2007

Through 2008, Pluto massages the cusp of Capricorn. Pluto, the ruler of the natural 8th House, other people’s resources and values, focuses our attention on Capricorn matters; government, life structures, ambitions, reputation, political power, even religious institutions.

Pluto doesn’t just focus attention – Pluto fuels obsession. Noel Tyl has found Pluto involved in the lives of the extremely prominent. I have found that certain placements of Pluto lead to a life that reads more like a soap opera than a biography: a real life of true melodrama, none of which is the "fault" of the person. Dramatic things just happen to these people, one after another and another.

In SF/F writing we look for the point in a character’s life where the character takes proactive charge of their situation. The events caused by that character’s actions form the plot of that character’s story.

But real life isn’t like that. We aren’t all orphaned heirs to the Throne raised in exile. We aren’t all Superman, Spiderman, or a Presidential Candidate.. Most of us readers aren’t special people whose actions create any obvious change in the World. (mystically, of course, we all know that we do matter, but it’s hard to see.)

I just watched a rerun of the film The Godfather. By pure "accident," that was after watching an even more significant film, You’ve Got Mail. If you somehow missed these films, do try to see them soon.

In You’ve Got Mail, the main characters quote The Godfather – two significant Pluto-esque quotes: "It’s not personal. It’s just business." And "Going to the mattresses."

Pluto is the descriptor that signifies the vast, impersonal tides that wash over our lives – "business" and "politics," "war" and even "religion.". In The Godfather, the arrival of drug trafficers in a gambling and prostitution territory sets off a mob war (Pluto is the upper octave of Mars). In You’ve Got Mail, economies of scale transform the publishing industry.

You’ve Got Mail, is about a trend in publishing I’ve often discussed here. The chain stores replaced the independent book sellers. One of the characters points out that the demise of the "mid-list" was caused by the chains.

"Mid-List" is the publishing term for the sort of novel this column prefers to focus on. It’s the kind of book that does not appeal equally to everyone, -- young, old, male, female – but rather appeals to a specific type of reader looking for a specific type of read. Publishers loved mid-list books because they had predictable sales volumes. That predictability changed.

You could argue that Pluto’s approach to Capricorn is changing the structure of publishing in that slow, drastic, inexorable Pluto style. Destruction comes first, then the explosive emergence of something wholly new. (perhaps the e-book; perhaps we have yet to see the death of "copyright" and something new replacing that.)

No individual writer, or even writer’s group can do or say anything that can deflect the course of that kind of change. (The recent screenwriter’s strike over e-rights; the screen actors making "excessive" demands on the studios in recent contract talks.etc.) This is Plutonian change. Note that the structures being changed are ruled by other planets.

So, with Pluto in Capricorn set to transform the structures of our civilization, I heard the head of a Hollywood studio say what Stephen Simon said in his column in The Monthly Aspectarian in April 2008. "Give us classic love stories and human dramas that uplift us and we care. Give us doom and gloom and we don’t watch." Hollywood has noticed that the public now wants escapism.

Escapism is mostly Neptune ruled. Fantasy is Neptune ruled as is Romance.

So now we see a reprint of Katherine Kurtz’s 1973 classic High Deryni, revised and expanded. Set in an alternate-history Earth, it still reads very nicely. All Kurtz titles have my highest recommendation if you like stories of magic, telepathy, horses and Royal Intrigue.

Airs and Graces by Toby Bishop is set in a fantasy world where only women who are virgins can ride flying horses. I read this second book of the Horsemistress Trilogy without having read the prequel, Airs Beneath the Moon, and found no difficulty because everything you need to know is explained – except perhaps that the title is taken from dressage training of modern horses and that "dressage" is the core training of a war horse practiced today in arena competition.

In Airs and Graces we have an example of the Pluto influence on the world. Larkyn, the main character who in the first book has mentally bonded with a flying horse against her society’s rules and won the right to be trained as a Horsemistress, never does anything to change her life or her world in this middle book. She’s a student and truly a victim of forces set in motion by the world’s Powerful.

This middle-trilogy book tells how Larkyn survives her schooling despite a plot by a powerful Lord to become the first man to be bonded to a flying horse by giving himself a sex-changing drug. It suffers from mid-trilogy sag because the protagonist can only survive attacks on her life, not change her life or her world. It sizzles with potential for the third book, though, because Plutonian change is surging into her world and we watch her grow into a woman who can and will ride that change to command her own world.

In stark contrast, we have Linnea Sinclair’s SF-Romance Shades of Dark (a Plutonian title if I ever heard one). Shades is a sequel to Gabriel’s Ghost, but has no trace of the usual "sag" in the plot line. Linnea skips over the "just survive and learn" section of Captain Chasidah Bergren’s story and plunges her directly into the "fix the universe and my life" section of her story.

Bergren’s situation is just as complex as, say, Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden character’s usual plights. She’s telepathically bonded to a powerful esper undergoing a burgeoning of his power which he, himself, does not understand. They’re hunted as interstellar criminals. She’s the ex-wife of an Imperial heir with political power, and it seems everyone is out to kill her.

Sinclair (a friend of mine,) deals head-on with the Plutonian power of sexuality and how it can short-circuit the power of true love. Chasidah Bergren is not a victim of the huge Plutonian changes sweeping her galaxy, even though she’s not in charge. Bergren is transforming Plutonian sexuality into Neptune’s unbreakable Tie That Binds – Love.

And here’s the fifth of Mike Shepherd’s series of Military SF novels about Kris Longknife, Audacious. The series, starting in 2004, is: Mutineer, Deserter, Defiant, Resolute, and now Audacious. Shepherd’s writing is solid, consistent. He’s somewhere between Robert Heinlein at his best and the new territory Sinclair is exploring.

Audacious brings in more of Kris’s family and shows why her heritage comes with such a reputation. One planetary war; one Longknife. No problem. I truly love this character.

The novels are told from Kris’s point of view, and we know that many of the improbable events that occur in her vicinity are somewhat inadvertent. She is embedded in a hugely complex interstellar political situation – and as with Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden and Sinclair’s Chassidah Bergren, many people are trying to kill Kris. She doesn’t always understand why, hasn’t personally done anything to cause it, yet is not a victim of her circumstances.

Maybe that’s why we love this type of novel. In real life, we’re striving to avoid being victims, though in our lives, huge, impersonal, riptides of change (like Medicare going bankrupt) sweep us head over heels into personal disaster, and the world sneers, "It’s just business." But it feels as if someone is trying to kill us. It feels like the government is conspiring – it must be the government because nothing else is big enough. Well, maybe Exxon.

These fantasy novels externalize and dramatize that feeling, even to the point of melodrama, through the story of a character who is the target of assassins or plots – or who inadvertently sets foot into, or is born into, secret (Pluto) business of the powerful (Pluto).

In The Godfather the Godfather did get shot; in You’ve Got Mail, the small bookstore did go out of business; in High Deryni a Throne is in jeopardy, in Airs and Graces, deadly grief was caused by secret plots, in Shades of Dark Bergren is dragged back into the very Hell she had escaped.

As melodramatic as these novels may seem to some, they do metaphorically describe what life is like in the 21st Century. Something is out to kill us. But it’s complicated.

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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