Hello all! This is the second to last MAR of the year! And there’s good stuff here. Two reviews, an Ed’s Corner, and the first annual Mithra Awards! Go have a look!
CONTENTS
Awards
The 2022 Mithra Awards
Reviews
Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Sapkowski, Blood of Elves
Lagniappe
Ed’s Corner: The Multi-Use Multiverse & Starting From Everywhere
AWARDS
I thought it would be fun to do some awards! This is based on a confluence of two things. One, is that I always do “best of the year” lists for my reading, but I don’t read that much published in this calendar year. I thought it would be nice to have something other than the Nobel honoring old books! Two, I have access to 3D printing. So, I printed out some little black cat statues, decided who my favorites were in various categories of book, and sent them out!
Here’s images of the awards. The big one is for the winners of best fiction and best nonfiction, the little ones are for categories.
Awards are harder to launch than I thought. If there’s a guide to starting your own award setup, my googling wasn’t enough to find it- just stuff about how to accept an award, if you get one at work or something. I had to track down addresses, or agent’s addresses, or where a given writer’s personal papers or wherever are kept, in the case of the dead. There were dilemmas like “should I give a prize to the next best book in the category that the best fiction or best nonfiction winner came from, and if so, should I tell them” that came up (“sure, why not?” and “no, why bother?”) were the answers I came to. It was fun, even if it took more work than I thought it might.
Without further adue, the winners-
Mithra Award winners, nonfiction categories:
Best “We/They Live(d) In A Society” Book: Michael Patrick Macdonald, All Souls: A Family Story From Southie (1997)
Best Theory and/or Criticism Book: Michael McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009)
Best US History Book: Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 (2021)
Best World History Book: Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (1958)
Best Nonfiction Book: Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (2022)
Mithra Award winners, fiction categories:
Best 4H (Horror, Humor, Historical Fiction, and Hombres (Westerns)) Book: Gretchen Felker-Martin, Manhunt (2022)
Best Crime/Spy/Thriller Book: Attica Locke, Heaven, My Home (2019)
Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Book: Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972)
Best Literary Fiction Book: Halldór Laxness, Independent People (1934)
Best Fiction Book: Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)
And that’s all she wrote! Those of you who prefer my top ten lists, worry not- I’ll send those out next week.
REVIEWS
Ben Fountain, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” (2012) - I came at this one precisely backwards. I saw the Ang Lee adaptation of this Iraq War film – really, more of a movie about surviving the Iraq War – with my roommate. We had heard it was very peculiar and a box office disaster, in part due to Lee’s decision to film at a very high frame rate. My roommate had just gotten a Blu-Ray player, or whichever technology it is, and so the painfully sharp images, which remind me of nothing so much as certain PBS productions, were right there in the living room. I didn’t even know it was based on a novel until I started asking around for good literary depictions of chaotic crowd scenes. A friend recommended this book, I found it used, here I am.
It’s good! The titular Billy Lynn is a nineteen year old private in the Army infantry. He’s there because he got in trouble back home and because he wasn’t sure what else to do with himself- his family isn’t exactly poor, but it’s not very functional. Billy’s squad was involved in a firefight in Iraq that wound up becoming a symbol of American courage (and lethality) as the Iraq war soured, won his squad and himself medals, and killed Billy’s best friend and mentor, Shroom. The Army brings the squad back to the US to be shown off at various events (especially in battleground states- this was 2004). The tour culminates at a Dallas Cowboys thanksgiving day home game, in Billy’s native Texas, where the squad is expected to meet and greet various big wheels and take part in a halftime show with Destiny’s Child.
Fountain weaves numerous threads — the squad’s efforts to get decent pay for selling their story to Hollywood, Billy’s sister (who was the origin point of the trouble that sent him overseas) desperately trying to get Billy out of going back to Iraq in two days, Billy finding unlikely love with a cheerleader, weird fights with roadies — around Billy Lynn. He skillfully keeps the threads wrapped around a central concept- the war sucks, but it also became the squad’s home. They can only really understand and be understood by each other. They’re not “boots” (to borrow a term from Marine, as opposed to Army, culture)- they don’t think the Army is great or civilian life without merits or the war good. They just are what they are — infantry grunts — and they can no more walk away from that than abandon selfhood. It changes their consciousness, not just their loyalties.
It’s not enough to say that Billy and the squad despise civilian America, like 21st century freikorps types. Pretty much all of them want to go back, when their hitch is through- they see themselves as, and are, hardened fighters, but not necessarily as a career. But there is a lot to despise in a 2004 patriotism-themed Dallas Cowboys outing- waste, ugliness, fake piety and endless fairweather patriotism. The aughts were a time when you could see America as a blind giant, monstrously strong but utterly incapable of using its strength in a sensible way, whether in the Middle East or just, maybe, giving the PTSD-suffering infantry squad some hint of what they’re expected to do during a halftime show in front of thousands and broadcast to millions. The halftime show was, presumably, the chaotic mob scene that my friend recommended I look at, and it is a fine scene, all of the endless money, noise, and sex of civilian America turned up to 11 and whirled around a group of confused teenaged soldiers.
From the cheap seats — mine, and that of Ben Fountain, who does not seem to have been in the military (he thanks people in the acknowledgment for filling him in on service life), it seems that the life of the grunt is the life of a young man, distilled. Put him into a tribe of young men, isolate him from others, and then put the group into extreme situations. There’s power there — who has gained or exercised power in this world without putting young men in isolated groups, putting arms in their hands, and directing them against those who stand in their way? — but that power gets put in the hands of others, who are generally indifferent to the grunts’ fates. Billy and his comrades try to tap into a little bit of it- to sell their story and make some money (typically, just enough money to get their families out of some lousy situation, not enough to be rich), to get laid, to slack off, to drink and gamble and live the life most young men want to lead amongst other young men. But the structures around them — that they take part in, by coercion but also by accepting default — channel most of their power to the structure’s end.
I guess if I had a criticism of this book, it’s the comparative lack of narrative thrust and, basically, stuff happening. Two fights — including one involving lethal violence — with a bunch of random roadie stagehands forces along the action, and feel wedged in. In general, though, limited agency on the parts of grunts makes a certain degree of sense. Even when offered a way out, there’s a certain extent to which Billy simply can’t take it, can’t be other than what he is. He and his sergeant can spite some money men looking to exploit their story, to finally bite back at a civilian world that has used and confused them, but that’s about it. Still- that seems reflective, of the lot of life of those who serve, and, if I dare make a comparison between (sacred) troops and (profane) civilians, of most of our lots. Fountain deserves a lot of credit for taking risks — setting the story during one day (with flashbacks), playing around with format in some places, having an important character be dead and only exist in Billy’s memory and imagination — and making this story as compelling as it is. ****’
Andrzej Sapkowski, “Blood of Elves” (1994) (translated from the Polish by Danusia Stok) (read aloud by Peter Kenny) - Three possibilities, here: the first is that you really should read the Witcher short stories before starting this, the first novel in the Witcher series, the Polish fantasy epic that has taken the world by storm via video game and netflix adaptation. The second possibility is that Andrzej Sapkowski just really expects you to be very heavily invested in his characters, especially titular Witcher (freelance mutated monster hunter, more or less) Geralt of Rivia (pronounced like a townie saying “Revere”) and his sometimes lover, the enchantress Yennefer, and that reading the previous short stories won’t really give you much more reason to care about them. There’s also the possibility of “both” - the earlier stories will give you more background, and Sapkowski has an exaggerated idea of how compelling his characters are.
In any event, “Blood of Elves” could probably use more context than I had to fully enjoy, but I also admired that it didn’t hold the reader’s hand too much. You get plunged into… I’m not sure that the world or part of the world in which it is set has a name, or if I just haven’t remembered, but anyway, a continent sort of like a mish-mashed medieval Europe. People describe the Witcher series as based in Slavic myth- I don’t know enough Slavic myth to say, but it makes sense, though from the names, institutions, etc., it doesn’t seem like Sapkowski is shy of dashing in cultural influences from all over Europe. It’s a fractured land with many kings ruling minor principalities, and there are also elves, dwarves, gnomes, and other sentient fantasy creatures running around, living in uneasy peace with the humans who are relative newcomers to the land. Looming over it all (like how Russia and/or Germany have loomed over Poland, historically, one is tempted to say) is Nilfgard, which tried to take over the whole area a few years back and did a lot of damage in failing to do so.
There’s a little girl, Ciri, who’s a refugee from the last war, and heir to the throne of one of the kingdoms (since occupied by Nilfgard). For both reasons of state – others of the royal lines want to use her as a symbol, or marry her into their families to establish a claim to her former realm – and reasons of prophecy, she is a Special Child. She hangs out at Witcher academy for a while, which is where we run into Geralt. She gets trained in Witcher stuff, like fighting, but they don’t zap her with mutagens to give her Witcher powers, super strength etc., and also the Witcher’s separation from humanity. She also trains some in magic with Geralt’s on-again off-again lover, the enchantress Yennefer.
There’s a lot more training, scheming, and portents – a lot, a lot of divining portents, most of them to do with Ciri’s special destiny and how it relates to Geralt – than there is real action, here, which again, might have been cooler had I done the preliminary reading. Geralt swears to protect Ciri, and there’s something about Ciri being “promised to him” in prophecy, and it’s unclear whether that means marriage or protection or what (the former is a little creepy because she’s a kid, and Sapkowski doesn’t stint on grown-up characters commenting on her “development” as she enters adolescence, which is about as fun to listen to as it sounds). One of the portents means she has to leave Witcher academy, though I’ll be damned if I could figure out why. They have to travel through a countryside with a pretty well-depicted guerrilla insurgency/counterinsurgency war going on between elves and humans who used to be chill together. Geralt has to do some derring-do monster fighting on a boat, and some spy stuff. Then there’s more portents and that’s more or less it.
There’s cool stuff in here but it doesn’t really gel- though again, I’m not sure if that’s the style, or if I’m just missing the context of the earlier books, like if I tried to start “The Lord of the Rings” with the second or third book. I kind of doubt it would blow me away anyway, but it’s fun enough to pick up the series again sometime, this time, at the proper beginning. ***’
LAGNIAPPE
The Multi-Use Multiverse & Starting From Everywhere
After the long absence last time, I’m trying to get back for another Ed’s Corner in relatively short order. This one, I hope, will be a bit shorter than the ramble I went on last time. It’s related to my previous topic of the way media companies integrate brands into the continuities of their creative works, but in a more general sense. In the last article we spoke a little about what the results of such integration might be, using Magic: The Gathering’s current consumer troubles as a guide, but in this article I want to talk about the literary devices that are used to open the door for greater brand integration in to an ongoing creative work, namely: the Multiverse.
Now, “literary device” might be giving the form too much credit, narrative trope might be the better term here. Let’s briefly go over what a multiverse is. The Ed’s Corner of a few months ago might unintentionally lead you to believe I’m talking about the philosophical and or quantum physics concept of Multiverse Theory, which I’m not. Here I mean Multiverse in the sense of the existence of multiple “realms” or “worlds” or “dimensions,” that are separate but somehow linked together within the universe of the story. Normally, the dimensions would exist isolated from the others, but in the story, they interact somehow. Technically speaking, The Chronicles of Narnia consists of a Multiverse: there’s the “real world” where the narrative begins, and then there’s the other world of Narnia that exists in an ineffable somewhere else. I haven’t read all the books, but if it was eventually revealed that Narnia was somewhere on the surface of Mars, and not wherever C. S. Lewis situated it cosmologically, and that people from earth could take a spaceship there and interact with the people of Narnia without the need for magic, then it wouldn’t be a Multiverse (N.B.- I have read the books, Narnia is indeed a multiverse setting).
It doesn’t necessarily have to be magic that makes a multiverse. In any plot where there’s time travel to avoid “the bad future,” the multiple timelines that compose the twisted ontological landscape of the fiction would also serve as functionally a Multiverse. Generally the important thing to understand is that there is a whole “reality” of a fictional universe, and then the connection of any number of additional fictional universes to that universe creates a Multiverse.
Now in the Narnia example, there are only two “universes” in the Multiverse (N.B.- in the ones Ed has read, anyway!), but there could be any number, or indeed an infinite number of them. Narnia only really serves as an illustrative example in that it’s the most basic type of a Multiverse- it has the minimum number of realities required to be multiple, that is, two. The current trends in brand integration require far more complex and specific types of multiverses. When you compare the multiverse of Narnia against the basic “split timelines” of a time travel yarn, you start to see where different types of Multiverses behave differently.
Narnia is a whole other world, with its own population of creatures separate from humanity. Aside from the Lion being Jesus, there really isn’t an “alternate” version of someone from the “real world” that is crossed over through the wardrobe that exists in the alternate reality. But if a time traveler moved through his Multiverse by switching from one timeline to another, the people and things in the other timeline would essentially be different versions of people who exist, or had existed in other timelines. In this way, you can distinguish between types of Multiverses by talking about the relationship between the inhabitants of the different universes within a given multiverse. Some Multiverses have distinct universes populated by different individuals that have absolutely no relation to anything in the other universe (Jesus sometimes excepted), and then there are Multiverses inhabited by “alternate” versions of people from any given universe, whether they be a version of themselves from “the bad future” timeline, or the evil version of themselves with a goatee from the “Mirror, Mirror” universe, they look the same superficially and answer to the same name, but are an alternate version of themselves in their own universe. It’s primarily the Multiverses of alternates I want to talk about today.
The idea of multiple versions of any particular person doesn’t necessitate time travel. A writer could simply write that there’s another universe out there somewhere that has a different version of characters in the universe the story is primarily set in, and not really need to explain why that’s the case. Oftentimes, the meta-narrative reason for a Multiverse structure is the writer is trying to sort out a continuity snarl. In long-running ongoing fiction projects, the ur-example of this dynamic is comic book continuity. This is where the trend really got started. Sometimes, a comic line just has a bad run of stories, or a good story that results in a narrative going into a corner. But the comic companies have got to keep churning the content mill, and can’t let a little thing like narrative resolution get in their way. But, they also have to preserve continuity to keep the readers invested. So they have a nice escape hatch, by declaring that a given story actually happened in an alternate universe, somewhere else in the Multiverse, but the main universe will continue on as before the bad run or plot snag. Easy. But the editorial winds of the comic publishers front office are fickle, especially in the famously continuity-clogged DC Comics. Writers might have to go back and get one of the characters from the alternate universe and put them back in the main universe, because they’re in an upcoming movie based on the character IP, and there are toys that need cross promoting. In other words: brand integration.
In this way, the barriers between different universes in the Multiverse become far more porous. Whereas before you’d only have the other universes in a Multiverse around for the story in which you had to reset your narrative stakes, now there’s characters and stories trudging back and forth across the Multiverse. What’s worse is that continuity applies to these trips between universes as well, so now there are meta-continuity snarls that you can’t solve by shoving it into a different universe, because now we’re traveling across the Multiverse all the dang time to pull characters, or versions of characters, out of one place and put them into another. How exactly you solve those problems I couldn’t tell you, DC Comics has been trying at least once a decade for the past fifty years to get a handle on that, with huge tie-in events like Crisis on Infinite Earths. These events have only been getting more frequent, more convoluted, and less written by Marv Wolfman ever since.
So okay, comics continuity has a problem with Multiverses piling up on top of one another, but they’ve been cross promoting movies and merch forever, this is hardly a new revelation about brand integration, as I was saying before. That said, recent developments have made it clear this isn’t a problem particular to comic books as a medium. Both Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons are technically set within a Multiverse, and they’re running into the same narrative problems inherent in the Multiversal structures that have long plagued comics.
The fundamental conceit of Magic is that the person playing their deck is a Planeswalker, someone who moves through the Multiverse casting spells and such, and calling up versions of heroes from various universes to help them in their wizard duels, and honestly it worked fine for the longest time only starting to wear thin in this recent wave of brand integration. While both Magic and Dungeons & Dragons feature Multiverses within their narratives, the rules of how their respective Multiverses worked didn’t really allow for one to intersect with the other. Not just any old wizard could planeswalk in Magic lore; even exceptionally powerful spellcasters didn’t necessarily have the ability to move through Magic’s multiverse. But in the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms crossover set with Dungeons & Dragons, the tediously lore-important mage Mordenkainen is said to be roughly equivalent to a planeswalker, along with the evil Spider Goddess Lolth. This isn’t a huge problem, even the developers were like, “look it doesn’t really count, we were just having some fun here,” but the systems don’t really mesh, and you kind of wonder if they’re going to do the same thing with the announced Doctor Who limited crossover set and just further confuse the issue with future brand integrations.
The real place we’re seeing this problem of Multiversal continuity mature along almost exactly the same lines as the comic books, is unsurprisingly, in the Marvel cinematic universe. This is particularly a problem as the stated selling point of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that all the movies have an intertextual relationship with one another, and events in one will affect the others. But narratives like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, and hell, even Avengers: End Game, which relied on alternate timelines to undo events from its lead in movie Infinity Wars, have hit the end of the road as far as plots in the main Marvel Cinematic universe can provide. The MCU increasingly often resorts to trips into the Multiverse. The next big Marvel release will be Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania whose big bad is slated to be Kang the Conqueror, whose core gimmick is being a time traveler. This choice certainly won’t reduce the amount of alternate timelines in play. Multiverses can be employed effectively, we’ll get to exactly how to structure good Multiverses in a moment, but the reasons why the plots of these films are resulting to Multiversality indicates that there’s a core tension between the device as its being used, and the central selling point of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole.
Let’s take this one step at a time. Spider-Man: No Way Home introduces the Multiverse by bringing the Toby McGuire and Andrew Garfield Spider-Man film series into the Marvel canon by gesturing toward their being a part of Peter Parker’s broader Multiverse. Now, this is obvious brand integration, but it’s set up in a way that actually halfway works. The two previous Spider-Man series are over and done with, they’re about as narratively complete as you can get, and thus there’s only so much that the involvement of “their” universe in the “main” universe can redirect the main story. The effects of the crossover are limited, it’s fine in and of itself, but the end result of the little cross property romp is a different matter.
At the end of the movie, everyone has forgotten that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, and the ongoing plot of Peter having been protege to Tony Stark is erased, which retroactively means that all of the cross continuity between the Avengers films and the main Spider-Man franchise doesn’t count for all that much, and from our current perspective, might as well have never had happened. Every minute you waited during the credits following a two and a half hour movie were, in the grand scheme of things, minutes wasted. Even the purported brand integration of the three Spider-Man franchise crossover was actually a misdirect. The ultimate narrative end of this crossover reset the Marvel Cinematic Universe Spider-Man, bringing him much closer to the working class and perpetually down on his luck Peter Parker familiar to Marvel Comics readers. In the movies, we've never really seen Peter as having to struggle with the working class life issues that are a hallmark of the character, as we're first introduced to him in the cinematic universe as a protege of the billionaire alter ego of Iron Man, Tony Stark.
It wasn't a bad dynamic, but being the unpaid intern of a super-genius wunderkind billionaire has fallen out of fashion of late, as the high profile tech billionaires that Tony Stark was a composite of have entered their flop era. By magicking away Peter's tech-bro toadying into the Multiverse, the film’s ending expressly sets him up for a more working class hard scrabble status quo to reflect the changing times.
I like a more proletarian Spider-Man. But you could have done the same thing by having the character learn a lesson in the movies and make a character-redefining decision in the narrative of the movies, rather than having it magicked away into another universe. The new Doctor Strange is an even more contrived series of Multiverse incidents to eliminate the current version of the Scarlet Witch. That Scarlet Witch needs to go, so that when Disney finally closes the deal to buy out the rights for the X-Men from 20th Century Fox, the version of her that is a mutant — the Fox version — can be slotted into the place where the Disney version used to occupy before she died in the plot of that movie. The end even sets up the promise of “universal incursions,” which is going to make the mutants of Fox X-Men appear from nowhere whenever those rights issues get cleared up.
There are ways to make Multiverses work narratively. You can ironically see this structure at work in another Spider-Man property: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. A Multiverse story can work out if the story is built around the concept from the beginning, rather than having it added as a means of resolving a problem deeply within an ongoing narrative continuity. The narrative purpose of the Multiverse in Into the Spider-Verse is the opposite of the purpose Disney found for Multiverse mechanics in No Way Home. Into the Spider-Verse uses the infinite possibilities of the Multiverse as a way to make the point that anyone can embody the virtues of Spider-Man, whereas No Way Home wants to highlight how it has exclusive ownership and control of the character of Spider-Man.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe Spider-Man products are interested in establishing the value of this particular version of Spider-Man as an intellectual property, and the narrative of the MCU films begins from a premise of establishing Peter Parker as a character and how he as a unique character has relations with others in the universe. If this Peter Parker can be easily transplanted into another universe, or be replaced by a version from another part of the Multiverse, then the front-loaded character development, and privileging the specific intellectual property version of Spider-Man would all be for nothing.
Sure, he’s Spider-Man, and that’ll put some butts in the seats, but the audience that’s been cultivated so far was perhaps engaged with other elements of the films other than the Spider-Man-ness of them. Maybe they liked the supporting characters, or the character arc that Spider-Man had gone through up until that point. Maybe something in the setting appealed to them, or they enjoyed the villains. Well, those supporting characters, settings, and so on can now be whisked away into the Multiverse forever, and the history of the character is merely one “universal incursion” away from being undone. If you liked the super-heroic version of New York City, you have to cross your fingers that Spider-Man doesn’t end up in a different universe where it’s constantly cowboy times, and you have to sit with the knowledge that no matter what villains Spider-Man overcomes, somewhere out there in the Multiverse, there’s another version of that villain that he didn’t beat. You can’t start from one place and end up successfully at a cohesive Multiverse, you have to start at the point where the Mutliverse already exists, and show that everywhere was always there to begin with.