At first look, the opening picture just looks like a stack of toys.  But when you realize that it’s all edible, mostly made of fondant — and not just impressive fondant statues of Marvin the Martian, Audrey II, and the Alien queen (piping gel drool!), not just Han Solo frozen in carbonite, ALF, Tom Servo complete with translucent Life-Saver head, a Dalek victim, and more, but also a cake pan underside made into HAL’s brain room, a fondant Tardis, and an inside joke only a SF geek could love — that’s in addition to the Obvious Exploitable Weakness — then you start to realize it’s pretty amazing.  Oh, also, she made a brick wall out of 1,500 fondant bricks mortared with royal icing, and two tiled movie-theater carpets out of caned fondant.

Look, really you just need to click on the first link and look at the whole thing piece by piece, to appreciate its utter majesty.

The awesomeness of the creator, Kimberly Chapman, is not to be underestimated.  Her other works of cake and sugar art include a Periodic Table of Cookies, a Fraggle Rock cake, a Shelob cake and an Orc head cake.

Vericon is a science-fiction, fantasy, gaming, and anime convention featuring many events and distinguished guest speakers. It has been held annually at Harvard University since 2001. The tenth Vericon will take place on Friday-Sunday, March 19-21, 2010. The convention is sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association (HRSFA), an undergraduate student group.

This year’s Guest of Honor is Timothy Zahn. It’s guaranteed to be a great Con, so if you’re in the Boston area–or can get there in the next 24 hours–I highly recommend you check it out!

In addition to all of the wonderful Vericon events, we have two HRSFANS events planned for the weekend: Saturday night Non-Cons, and Sunday lunch. See the hrsfans-announce email list for more information.

Almost all the Alternative History computer simulations suggested that the Battle of Tours (A.D. 732) was one of the crucial disasters of mankind. Had Charles Martel been defeated, Islam might have resolved the internal differences that were tearing it apart and gone on to conquer Europe. Thus centuries of Christian barbarism might have been avoided, the Industrial Revolution would have started almost a thousand years earlier, and by now we would have reached the nearer stars instead of merely the farther planets….

I do not remember when I read the novel, but it must have been right around early high school. I remember little of it beyond the outline of the main plot, the monks and the butterflies, and that little paragraph about alternate history: what if, in effect, the Dark Ages had been averted?

Of course even phrasing the question that way is a vast oversimplification of the long course of a whole host of cultures—I now know somewhat more about those subtleties—but the question as such captivated me. We live in such accelerated times that the seeming changelessness of prior centuries boggles our minds (though, again, that apparent changelessness no doubt oversimplifies). What if Earth had had an 800-year head start on the Industrial Revolution?  Good heavens, where could we be now?  (I suppose that’s answering my own question….)

This past season I have been reading The Best Alternate History Stories of the Twentieth Century, edited by Harry Turtledove. But alternate history is fascinating in more than just fiction. A friend once told me that the “many-worlds” hypothesis comes to mind for him whenever he does something particularly stupid and escapes death, which happens occasionally (if not too alarmingly so) as a pedestrian in a city such as Boston. On such occasions he considers briefly and pities any number of now-dead “alternate selves.” I have always assumed that nearly all people rehash key conversations in their minds; though in my own case I try to focus on remembering the events as they happened, one also is tempted to consider how they might have gone better.

WARNING: Star Wars spoiler ahead.  Then again, I expect that many of us were spoiled for Star Wars before we were born.

And then … my own personal alternate Star Wars history (and I am not going to look up any sources for this, deliberately!): I have heard that Darth Vader’s declaration of paternity at the end of The Empire Strikes Back was so very secret a revelation that the crew’s scripts were written falsely, such that during the filming of the scene, the actor said something entirely different, while Jones dubbed the real line in later (of course, since it wasn’t Jones in the Vader suit, the last part is almost certainly true). My own reconstruction has it that, to downplay the deception, the actor must have said something that kind-of-almost would have made sense.  And the only other even halfway-consistent alternate history would have been, I feel, for Obi-wan himself to have been Luke’s father. And what would that have meant?

I didn’t like this episode at first, but even by the end of the first listening it makes a lot more sense, and I think many of you would be happy to think through its themes, as well–not to mention its references. (Battlestar Galactica serves as the “star” example of a TV show that grapples with big questions; Lost and House play second bananas.)

Enjoy … and while you’re at it, enjoy The Novelist As God and A History of Doubt, Speaking of Faith programs from earlier this year.  All are related somehow to the place for storytelling, and narrative-making, in the human mind.

Hannah wrote:

Our books describe us: they expose our studies, our interests, our values. They also expose the values we think we should project: there is a reason the religion and philosophy books are in the living room and the fantasy novels in the bedroom. While I am a great believer in the importance of fantasy and fairy-tales, putting those books in the living room would make me feel a need to explain them to all of our guests: “Yes, these are children’s books. They are ‘easy’ to read; they don’t have the weight of tradition. Yes, they are escapist. But is that so wrong?” I love the novels I read, but I am still somewhat embarrassed by them. I don’t read them to discover fundamental truths about the world, but simply for entertainment. The religion and philosophy books, on the other hand, are in the living room to convey, “We are Christians. We are proud of our faith, and want you to know about it. But we are also thinkers. We read and study and learn. Our faith is intellectual, as well as evangelical.”

My instinct is to suspect this lady needs more friends who read—or at least some new sources for ideas about books. Ideas such as C.S. Lewis’s in An Experiment in Criticism, that the value of a book may lie less in how it is written and more in how it is read. I haven’t met Hannah or her bookshelves, so there is the possibility that I would agree with her that her fantasy collection is escapist, childish, flighty. Yet this is unlikely.  And even if it were true, I would nonetheless take umbrage on behalf of the rest of us readers—and writers.

In my comment to Hannah’s post, I mention The Lord of the Rings and Lord of Light as examples of “weighty” fantasy. Tolkien’s masterpieces are properly not novels at all, but romances (which I would expect Hannah, as a self-described literary critic, to appreciate).  Zelazny’s is a far more modern form and yet draws on ancient traditions in a sophisticated way.

What man who has lived for more than a score of years desires justice, warrior? For my part, I find mercy infinitely more attractive. Give me a forgiving deity any day.

Being a god is the quality of being able to be yourself to such an extent that your passions correspond with the forces of the universe …

Forget about the theological discourse. The very grammar of this book isn’t meant for children.  And anyone who mistakes it for a children’s book merely because it deals in the fantastical is missing the point to a potentially dangerous extent.  (See Michael O’Brien’s bizarre characterization of Dune in his literary criticism A Landscape with Dragons: the battle for your child’s mind: “The author’s [Herbert's] mind is religious in its vision, and he employs a tactic frequently used by Satan in his attempt to influence human affairs. … The people settle for the lesser evil, thinking they have been ’saved’, when all the while it was the lesser evil that the devil wished to establish in the first place.”)

Do I read fantasy and other speculative fiction to be entertained?  Yes.  Do I read it to discover or cement elemental truths?  Heck, yes! Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis books (also known collectively as Lilith’s Brood) contain, among pages and pages of acute observations on personal relationships and power plays, one of my favorite images for soul-sickness anywhere on this green Earth.  I wish that, like Aaor in Imago, my body began to disintegrate when I felt unloved.  —Okay, so I don’t wish that, literally speaking—it could get kind of messy at times—but the idea of physically expressing my psychic state in such an obvious way is deeply attractive. All literature is metaphorical, and the metaphors in good speculative fiction are gorgeous and subtle and deeply, deeply spiritual.

And I am proud to say those characters and that imagery live in my mind and in my actions.

Kay worked with Christopher Tolkien in compiling The Silmarillion, so he learned from the best. (On occasion when I have said this I have been corrected that this only proves Kay learned from the canon. I stand by my assertion.) The Tapestry demonstrates in every particular how deeply Kay loves stories and storytelling: it honors chivalric romances as well as modern coming-of-age novels while being in its essence high fantasy at its most wrenching.

The Tapestry’s central metaphor is of the worlds/worlds’ stories brought together thread by thread as if on a loom worked by God (the Weaver).  This is–surely by design–not unlike the Silmarillion’s song of creation. Following the metaphor, all things/events/people are unified in meaning, but the meaning is literally an added dimension, not something individuals can experience. 

The later books in the Tapestry draw heavily on Arthurian stories, but the overall structure is that of a portal fantasy. Five young Canadians, grad students, are drawn into Fionavar, First of All Worlds (this is a Capitalization Kind of Tale), to address a need. There is some minor back-and-forth between worlds, but mainly we’re in a romanticized late-Middle Ages type world where magic, Fate, gods, elves, dwarves, giants, &c. are closer to the surface–okay, right out there–than your average Earther experiences.

And it’s beautiful. The writing, the story, the world: all of it. Spectacular imagery dances through my mind as I write this–I am nearly reeling with it–but I do not want even to try to express Kay’s creations in my own words. So I’ll try to replicate for you my first experience with The Summer Tree. I found the book on the shelves of my local Borders and opened it by happenstance to one of the two passages in the whole book (by my calculation) that just absolutely brains the reader like a psychotropic 2×4. I offer to you the other such passage.

My father says the Tapestry was written for people in their twenties; the central characters’ stage in life is one manifestation, but, more than that, there’s a particular young and all-or-nothing energy to the writing. I am already beyond dealing with suchlike. I will perhaps never reread again the books of the Tapestry, after three times or so through over the course of my teens and early twenties.  I would love to reread them, yet by now I know too well: the foreshadowing is too intense to bear.  I feel the weight of the entire trilogy on my back in every scene. Again, I am certain that the books were expertly crafted to produce just this effect–Kay, I imagine, sees them as a whole.

I’m going according to my own personal order of precedence: Lord of Light is in my opinion perhaps not the best, but certainly the coolest, thing next to Dune.  It’s by far the best of the few Zelazny works I have read (although “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is similar enough), and top-drawer among far-reaching, ambitious science fiction.

Lord of Light takes place on a colony world that has all but forgotten the existence of “vanished Urath”–but much of culture we would recognize does persist. Specifically, the conflict between Hinduism and Buddhism. The technology that (long before the era of the story) has set the plot in motion is a “reincarnation” device that allows rich or powerful enough people to transfer to new bodies, but as a technology this barely plays a part. The real kick-start to the story is that those who control this technology have by now lived long enough to have discovered and developed within themselves certain psychic abilities … and that they declare themselves the gods of the planet, based on the Hindu pantheon. They are opposed by an original settler of the world, Sam, who plays out the Buddha’s role, speaking for the oppressed against the status quo.

I read Lord of Light long before I knew anything significant about Eastern religions, and it blew my mind. I have since studied Hinduism academically, and Lord of Light loses nothing with increased familiarity. I referred earlier to this book as being simply cool. Read this:

Being a god is the quality of being able to be yourself to such an extent that your passions correspond with the forces of the universe….

It’s all the better when I tell you that this, my favorite speech in the novel, comes from Yama, the Deathgod. But then it’s better still when you reflect that this is not inconsistent with the teachings of all sorts of religious cosmologies. There is a natural law, which one can access by digging deep enough within oneself. Or, in slightly more Hindu terms, the universe is one. It gives me courage.

Courage, however, is not why I read Lord of Light. There’s a couple of awesomely written scenes. There’s some wry characters. There’s some to be learned, and far more to consider. And, as in many of my favorites, there are no easy answers.

Personally, I am a proper Dune fanatic. Dune is the War and Peace of speculative fiction, and, yes, I say that believing War and Peace is the greatest novel yet written. Dune, too, encompasses everything:

• War
• Peace
• Guerrilla tactics
• Religion
• Fanaticism
• Time
• Space (tesseracts)
• Love
• Death
• Psychology
• Compromise
• Ecology
• Legend
• &c…

The plot is intricate and deeply thought out, several of the characters can break a reader’s heart, and the world-creation is quite simply complete.

I first encountered the Dune world at age 13, through the David Lynch movie adaptation.  I read the novel immediately afterwards, and since then have owned somewhere on the order of a dozen copies, most of which I have given away (indeed, the purpose of having extra copies on hand).  I generally try to start reading the book slowly with lots of processing time; this works with many books I love, but in the case of Dune I am inevitably absorbed, and I career through the last 150 pages in a short evening.  I am left feeling somewhat heartsick each time, for Dune ends but does not resolve: the story is wide-ranging and messy, and even the “right” solution to the crises involve lots of death and–worse–soul-destruction and the breaking of barriers that protect people, like self-preservation.  None of which will be forgotten or forgiven, the ending makes clear.  I love the story for its truth to life that way. 

I have seen a friend become a creature.

In my family, I should note, “proper Dune fanatic” means that we attempt to forget the existence of all series books subsequent to Dune itself.  Or at least to spare ourselves any interaction with them.  Dune ends openly, and so theoretically open to sequel, but Herbert was quite evidently utterly unable to keep up the intensity of engagement that any true succeeding volume would have required.  I don’t necessarily hold this against the author; I have been told that many of the subsequent books were written to make money for Mrs. Herbert’s medical bills, and I tend to imagine that Dune as a universe is something powerful enough that it existed (somehow) prior to the books, while Herbert merely (somehow) saw it and tapped into it.  Which is a great accomplishment in and of itself, and should be enough.

The Twilight Zone, as I hope you know, was an early-1960s American television show, mostly half-hour episodes of bizarreness.  It’s beautiful, and still often available for your viewing pleasure. Some episodes are explicitly science fiction (time travel, space travel, aliens, &c.), others more horror-like (evil dolls, dead grandmothers speaking through toy telephones, monsters on airplanes, &c.).  Some characters are cutesy, and some twists are corny, but the overall effect of being drawn into the Twilight Zone is one of astonishing insight into what people don’t talk about.  Rod Serling, the host and creator of Twilight Zone, invites the viewer to consider what people’s fears mean to their humanity. TZ is a Cold War show, and in the situations it uses often of its time, but at the same time the stories told through those situations are remarkably timeless.

Invisible Cities is more recent, a book from the 1970s by the experimental Italian-out-of-Cuba writer Italo Calvino (I love it that the author’s initials are the same as those of the book–albeit only in English).  I first encountered Calvino in my Expos class freshman year at Harvard, a course called “The Limits of Originality” in which we compared linked works of literature or other art.  Cities, for which the “framestory” is a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, was paired with excerpts from The Travels of Marco Polo.

But, despite occasional specific directions between one city and another, Invisible Cities is hardly a travelogue.  The cities–each sketched in a few paragraphs or at most a few pages–are fantastical and dreamlike, and generally not located in any geographical space.  Each city has a woman’s name, and a theme.  In each city, life is exaggerated in some pointed way–a strange relationship to their ancestors or descendents, or to the heavens, or to the neighbors that illuminates human relationships in our world. 

Reading science fiction or fantasy I often find myself wishing that my inner world could be so externally obvious–that my body would begin to disintegrate without someone to love, or that I could bleed to death for breaking a vow.  Yes, it would make life perilous in whole new ways, but sometimes I feel that it just might be worth it for my physical nature to reflect psychological stresses obviously enough for any bum on the street to see.  (Maybe I’d be more attuned to them then, too.) 

That’s what I get from both Calvino’s and Serling’s collections of oddities–a tuning to my nature and my neighbors’. 

Also, after Expos class I made it a life’s goal to memorize Invisible Cities–I figured I had a good 50-70 years to work on it, and it’s not that long, and very poetic–but I haven’t made any progress.  (Maybe if I actually owned a copy again … hmmm.  I got so into Bookcrossing that all my copies were released “into the wild.”)