You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News by Cracked.com

In my review of John Dies at the End, by Cracked’s pseudonymous senior editor David Wong, talked briefly about how the resurrected humor magazine’s new online format works surprisingly well. I find it consistently funnier than, say, The Onion, whose satire is more biting but which I find terribly formulaic.

The relative success of the new website and its list-based articles eventually spurred the editors to do what most successful humor websites eventually do: take their existing content, add a couple of new pieces, and attempt to sell it to fans that have already read the material online. See Stuff White People Like and Maddox’s The Alphabet of Manliness for just two examples.

As an admitted (casual) fan of the website, my critique of You Might Be a Zombie‘s contents will obviously not be negative: if you’re familiar with the contents of the website, then you’ve already read 90% of the book.

On the real Cracked.com, this would have a funny caption

I can say that I am disappointed but not surprised that Cracked‘s use of stock images and witty captions was excised—since, of course, grabbing stuff from a Google Image search might fly on a website, but doesn’t quite pass muster in the publishing industry. Though the writing at Cracked tends to be good anyway, one of the best parts is this sort of contrapuntal style. Though the writing is the same, the transition to book format simply isn’t lossless.

You’ll notice, too, the crass (but, we’re talking about a humor website, so who cares about crass?) way in which Cracked names the book from a single article about zombies, I suppose hoping to tap into the current zombie zeitgeist that Max Brooks unleashed on the world with The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. The whole enterprise just seems a little half-assed and unfortunate; I can’t blame them for trying to make money with a book, but I say rather firmly that you’re much better off just reading the website.

For those unfamiliar with the website, however, a typical Cracked article follows the format “[Number] [Thing]s [Shocking Qualifier]“. For instance, “Five Awesome Things You Didn’t Know Were Making You Sick”. It doesn’t pull the same sort of shenanigans that the nightly news does, where, e.g., they’ll warn you to tune in at 11 to find out how your washing machine might kill your children, and then it turns out to be that putting a child in a washing machine and running it through a cycle can be fatal—who knew?—and you feel cheated and stupid for ever thinking that your local news has anything interesting to say.

No, the writers in this book have a little more dignity than that, though of course one should take everything with a grain of salt. You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News has no citations for any of its information; the website, at least, is littered with hyperlinks, though they tend to be to obscure references in Google Books or etc., so often the [Shocking Qualifier] about [Thing] is a bit dubious. As I mentioned, the allure of Cracked is its irreverence, well-timed and well-put captions, and laugh-out-loud humor; if you want sterling factual content, go read Snopes or The Straight Dope, or arm yourself with a grain and salt and go down the rabbit hole that is Wikipedia.

For fans of Cracked, I would encourage you to seek out new content by bespoke writers. Robert Brockway, for instance, who is represented in this collection, has an existing book (Everything is Going to Kill Everybody) and is currently self-publishing a sci-fi novel in episodes (Rx). David Wong, author of the zombie article for which this omnibus is named, wrote John Dies at the End (the sequel for which is coming out later this year). These are likely to be a better use of your time that the You Might Be a Zombie itself.

Super Mario by Jeff Ryan

We were a Sega household growing up; I’m not sure what drove my parents to wrap up a Genesis one Christmas instead of a Nintendo, but my childhood was nonetheless more about Sonic the Hedgehog than Mario the “plumber”. That being said, we had no shortage of interaction with Nintendo products either before or after, generally playing them at friends’ houses. Or, as was the case for a number of years, occasionally renting an original NES from the video store for the weekend.

It was impossible to avoid Nintendo’s cultural impact in the late 80s and most of the 90s, even as other manufacturers began to make inroads into the console market; and far from being simply a video game company, Nintendo cultivated a brand that included magazines, mail order merchandise, and a two-hour commercial called The Wizard. And while Nintendo had various hits, and its name alone could sell swag, its name was intrinsically linked with a little Italian named Mario Mario.

Super Mario (the book) is a history of Nintendo, but its narrative linchpin is Mario, who represents its sudden rise from a card game company to the largest video game maker in the world, its eventual decline as a stodgy moralist in an emerging market of dark and violent games, and its ongoing resilience despite everything.

Seriously, this guy's worth about a billion dollars

Of critical importance is the young (in 1981) Shigeru Miyamoto, a student designer who was assigned to work on a product that would eventually become Donkey Kong, now a classic but then something of a gamble. Though some people forget, the character of Mario was first introduced in Donkey Kong, not in the later Super Mario Bros. game for NES; the time, rather than a plumber named Mario, he was a carpenter named Jumpman. Miyamoto eventually became the creative mind behind not only Donkey Kong, but also the entire Mario franchise, as well as the Zelda, Star Fox, and F-Zero franchises. In other words, it’s startling how much of Nintendo’s early dominance and overall success in the video game market is directly attributable to the work of a single man.

But so it is, largely because Miyamoto has a knack for creating not only iconic characters, but engaging gameplay; there have been missteps of course, such as his decision to make the original Super Mario Bros. 2 so difficult that a totally different version had to be released in America. It’s tough to say in retrospect which is worse: the insanely difficult original, or the turnip-throwing substitute, replete with a gender-confused, egg-spitting dinosaur.

Nintendo became largely a victim of its own success. Its rise to power in the video game market coincided with a national panic about the corrupting influence of video games and their content, given voice by the hapless Senator Joe Leiberman; Nintendo, already infamous for its strict policies about game content, felt comfortable pointing to itself as a family-friendly company whose games were largely appropriate for all ages, and contained little in the way of controversial content. That this tactic was successful doubtless cemented the wisdom of the policy in the minds of Nintendo execs.

But a funny thing happened in the latter half of the 1990s. Nintendo, resting comfortably on its laurels, didn’t push forward with technology, and the end result was an exodus of developers from Nintendo’s cartridge-based N64 to Sony’s new Playstation (and later Microsoft’s XBOX). At the same time, the kids who cut their teeth on Mario were now growing up, and no longer wanted family-friendly video games, but rather war simulations, violence, sex, and all the wonderful R-rated stuff that we’ve become so used to. Because Nintendo still firmly abided by its strict content policies, it once again missed the boat, and its place in the market faltered. Even its 5th-generation console, the Gamecube, stuck to a proprietary disk, and once again failed to impress most reviewers.

Nowadays, the console marketed is dominated by talk of the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 and all of the massive, immersive games available for them. Nintendo’s current-generation offering, the Wii, was much-derided at its launch for being underpowered, and for its library of games once again skewing toward children and families.

You've come a long way, baby

And yet… as of 2012, the Wii has moved about 95 million units; the XBox 360 is in second with 66 million, and the PS3 in third 59 million. This, despite all the jawing about the Wii being a niche console, or its game library too narrow, is the strength of Nintendo: its brand still moves units, and it manages despite its foibles to stay successful in a market it no longer easily dominates.

It’s a precarious existence: Miyamoto is so treasured that he is not allowed to ride his bike to work for fear that he’ll be killed in a traffic accident. It’s difficult to say just how Nintendo would fare if Miyamoto vanished tomorrow; they certainly have a built-up stock of intellectual property, but game makers must continually look ahead and innovate or they will be trampled in the forward march of progress.

That Mario has lasted so long is a testament to the lovability of the character and the long-lasting impact of the games (and their place in history as some of first mass-market video games), even after a number of missteps such as Mario-based education games. It also underlines the fact that there is no substitute for a love of craft and good design when it comes to video games. For all the hundreds of Mario clones and generic platformers, none have captured the same visual design, control, and cultural mania that Mario has. As a metonym for Nintendo as a whole, Mario has served Ryan’s narrative admirably.

Maphead by Ken Jennings

Ken Jennings may always be known as “that guy from Jeopardy!“; that’s certainly how I tend to think of him. For those of you who don’t know, Jennings became a minor celebrity in 2004 when he won 74 straight games of the popular TV quiz show, winning just over $3 million total. I expected a brief time in the limelight for Jennings; when he wrote a book called Brainiac, about his experience in quiz shows and the broader world of trivia buffs, I was unsurprised and wrote it off as a gimmick. When he wrote a second book, Ken Jennings’s Trivia Almanac, I once again took it for an easy way to ride the short-lived wave of fame that carries intellectuals.

But then I saw Maphead, a book about cartographers, self-proclaimed map geeks, and the strange, occluded subculture of geography and maps. My curiosity got the better of me: I gave it a try.

I bet this guy is great at parties

Let me admit some bias right away: Jennings is a Mormon, a member of a faith that prohibits drinking, smoking, gambling, and requires its members to wear special holy underwear. In other words, members tend toward social conservatism. This doesn’t make them bad people (I know several), but knowing this, I figured that Maphead might be impeccably-researched, but a bit on dowdy and humorless side. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that not only is Jennings smart, but he has a surprising aptitude for writing. He’s not bawdy, but he’s able to be witty and occasionally irreverent in a way that surprised me.

More important, Maphead is a genuinely interesting look at maps. I’m not naturally good with maps—my natural spatial reasoning is relatively poor—but I’ve had a map bug ever since reading Nicholas Tam’s “Here Be Cartographers” last year. Here’s what Tam says about maps:

It is hard to imagine a world without maps.

Now stop—and diagram that sentence. Break its syntax apart. You can parse it in at least two valid and meaningful ways:

• It is hard | to imagine | a world without maps. The use of maps is so embedded in our daily lives, so essential to our normal functioning, that the idea of a pre-cartographic society is as alien as the thought of a pre-literate one. On top of this, our idea of what it means to be a mapped society is itself confined to our familiarized expectations of what maps are like. How did people get by without maps—or rather, without the sorts of maps we know and understand?
• It is hard | to imagine a world | without maps. Maps govern the way we think about space, and that extends to imaginary or hypothetical spaces. Without a graphic representation on paper or in our heads, our plans for things not yet built—homes, roads, electric circuits—may be cloudy and ambiguous. They may lack precision in the same way we have trouble with describing things that are outside our linguistic abilities. This is a negative definition of maps as a form of language: to be without a map is to be without language, and it impedes us from communicating ideas in the mind—to others, yes, but also to ourselves.

Jennings’ book about maps was more about map collecting and geography than strictly cartography, and the book is somewhat less insightful than Tam’s, but I admit the comparison is not a fair one. Actually, Jenning’s focus is more broad and more shallow, which is unsurprising for a published book; nonetheless, what Jennings does cover is both interesting in content and, I must admit, totally engaging. There’s fluff chapters: his attendance at a national geography bee (emceed every year by none other than Alex Trebec) tends to devolve into a half-admiring, half-horrified shock at the level of intelligence and latent misery in these fiercely competitive children (and their often-absurd parents). Others are a small slice of a specialized topic, such as Jim Sinclair’s “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre”, an annual mail-in contest that revolves around some serious atlas fu, and Jennings’ attempt to play the game with his wife and young children illustrate precisely why maps and map wonks have gotten such a bad rap over the years.

Far from being a staid defense of cartography and cartophiles, in fact, Mapheads, whether by design or accident, presents a pretty clear case for both sides. On the one hand, Jennings goes far to illustrate why cartography is so immensely fascinating, and the notion of a visual recording of spatial concepts is such a beguiling, pervasive, and occasionally all-encompassing topic. On the other hand, the niche map collectors and geography bee contestants reinforce the notion of maps as a dry-at-best and masturbatory-at-worst pursuit, best left to brainiac quiz-show winners and their ilk.

But, and this speaks to his wisdom, Jennings finishes the book’s expository arc with the forward-looking aspects of cartography. Last is Google Maps (and its brethren, such as MapQuest, which technically pioneered the concept but was superseded by Google’s own offering and later meta-offering, Google Earth), and the hungry search for a better map database: the hunt to map everything down to a finer and finer resolution. This looks forward to the future, and is an appropriate and prescient ending to Jenning’s whole premise, which is that whether cartography is a niche fetish or a public member of the cultural zeitgeist, its importance to us remains relatively constant. Prior to this, however, is I think the single most important chapter apart from his opening premise: Jennings dives into the wild and wooly world of Geocaching. If you don’t know what it is, I won’t belabor the point: see Wikipedia’s entry for a concise summary. The sudden and startling popularity of geocaching speaks not only to the relative accessibility of maps and spatial data in the era of Google Maps and GPS devices, but to the sort of pioneering spirit that still delights in navigation, exploration, and discovery.

Jennings is (most well known as) a trivia expert, not a mapmaker or a geocaching legend or explorer. Perhaps that is why his amateur enthusiasm for maps, and recently for geocaching, is so engrossing and inspiring and marvelous. It’s the very sense that a non-cartographer could become so engrossed in an internet-based, map-centric activity like geocaching that validates the entire premise of his book, namely that map-making, map-reading, and blatant cartophilia may be a niche of popular culture, but it’s nevertheless an engrossing and compelling one. All laud and honor to Jennings for creating a book that not only celebrates an underappreciated aspect of history and science, but also eliminates (in my mind) his status as a one-hit-wonder of pop culture by showing that apart from being trivial(?), he can also be an excellent chronicler as well.

Supergods by Grant Morrison

I’ve never been much of a comic fan; my brother liked them for the both of us. Despite a flirtation with our local comic store’s annual summer clearance sale, and a long-lived passion for the 6-issue Double Dragon series in 1991, the medium left me largely cold, and I eventually became enamored of the long-form novel.

As a result of either my age or my eventual indifference to the format, I was unaware or unimpressed of most of the important happenings in the medium. I learned most of the historical ones—e.g., the origins the Batman and Superman, and their eventual censorship or transmogrification during the panic of the 1950s—from David Hadju’s The Ten-Cent Plague, and many of the latter-day events either from first-hand knowledge—e.g., hearing about Bane breaking Batman’s back or Doomsday killing Superman—or finally reading the graphic novels themselves—e.g., Alan Moore’s critical 1980s work The Watchmen and V for Vendetta. For what it’s worth, I tried reading Roger Stern’s 1994 The Death and Life of Superman, though it was beyond my 9-year-old self.

I only heard about Grant Morrison through the grapevine; I have yet to read a comic by him, but I ascertained from context clues that he’s become kind of a big deal in the comic world. When my friend recommended Supergods, I decided it would be fun into enter the occluded world of comic books. It’s not a comic or graphic novel, mind you: it’s an interesting blend of comic book history and Morrison’s own life and career in the industry. It works about 50% of the time.

Easily the most engaging portion of Morrison’s book is the first half, where he covers the early history of comic books. In particular, he addresses the creation of the Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman characters, among others, noting how the unique characteristics of each reflected their creators and the environment in which they were created. He briefly touches upon the mid-century panic, and notes the excellent The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hadju. Even more interesting is the way in which characters changed to match the zeitgeist: Superman morphed from a simple do-gooder to a ridiculous über-patriot during the 40s and 50s. Batman began as a dark and creepy detective, but eventually became a silly, camp figure to survive the comics witchhunt—you could argue that the camp peaked either with the TV series starring Adam West or with the 1997 Joel Schumacher film Batman and Robin, both of which Morrison covers. There is, of course, all kind of minutiæ that I’m eliding here; Morrison qua historian is thorough. But while Hadju more or less ends his narrative in the middle of the century, Morrison—obviously—goes on the cover the second rise of comics, with the emergence of the two heavyweights, DC and Marvel, and a slew of imprints large and small.

With this, however, Morrison also begins to inject his own biography into the narrative. This is fine, to a point; but soon he goes down the rabbit hole by relating, for instance, a crazy drug trip he had in Kathmandu and how he thinks it expanded his consciousness blah blah blah… there’s way, way too much hokey hippie drug nonsense going on here, and Morrison—even writing retrospectively—seems to take it very seriously. This whole section is a shambles, made worse by its stark contrast to the solemn comic book hagiography of the first half of the book. It’s a stumble from which Morrison never really recovers, limping wounded across the finish line of the present day and reiterating his thesis.

"And they come to Jerusalem: and Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves"

Said thesis is a good one, too, if a little self-evident. As the title alludes, comic book superheroes are not simply heroes in the sense that Bruce Willis plays a hero in the Die Hard series, or Harry Potter plays a hero in his eponymous series; rather, our comic book superheroes form a sort of modern-day pantheon. They are gods and demigods onto whom we place our own frailties and vices and hopes and dreams. The dominant modern-day monotheisms don’t have these characters like ancient Greece or Rome or Scandinavia; there isn’t an intermediate layer that bridges the gap between humanity and the divine. I suppose you could point to the story of Jesus and the moneylenders, but it’s not quite the same thing, since the pantheons of old were often cruel and capricious. This is why Superman has changed along with culture, becoming the Superpatriot, and a social realist superman, and a dead man, replaced by several different personalities lik an evil robot, a deputized steelworker, and an artificial alien life form. Batman, too, is a vessel for the dark, pragmatic parts of our personality, albeit one with long campy interstice. Our collection of superheroes are a manufactured mythology, highly-stylized forms of our deepest neuroses and sometimes our greatest achievements. It’s not an unreasonable theory, and it explains—in part—why not just comics, but certain individual superheroes, have such staying power, even eighty years after their creation.

If only Supergods hadn’t take such a strange turn halfway through, and Morrison hadn’t decided that his colorful past was perfect material for his argument (why?), the final product would have been so much more impressive.

Half Empty by David Rakoff

Four years ago, I read David Rakoff’s Don’t Get Too Comfortable, a book of collected essays. Rakoff, an out gay man, reads like a more curmudgeonly and hyperliterate version of David Sedaris, like the bastard love-child of Sedaris and Chuck Klosterman. Years later, Rakoff’s next book, Half Empty, capitalizes on his dark worldview by offering a series of loosely-connected essays in defense of the notion that pessimism is not all bad.

Half Empty doesn’t offer any central thesis, per se; there’s no stated hypothesis. I assumed, in fact, that it was simply a small collection of previously-written essays which all simply captured the dour, comic voice of a middle-aged, openly-gay Jewish cancer survivor. Oy! The book begins by noting Julie Norem’s The Positive Power of Negative Thinking, a 2002 book that defends pessimism as a natural—indeed, smart—defense mechanism, by preparing for the worst and causing its practitioners to analyze circumstances and events more carefully than their bubbly, optimistic peers. Rakoff said in an interview on The Daily Show, however, that Half Empty was, in fact, an engineered defense of pessimism. It is “essentially about pessimism and melancholy. All the other less than pleasant to feel emotions that because they are less than pleasant to feel have been more or less stricken from the public discourse but in fact have their uses and even a certain beauty to them”, according to an interview with The Daily Californian.

One important thing to note about Rakoff is that his writing style is, despite his frequent comparison to David Sedaris, far more literate and intellectual. Consider this passage (a single paragraph) from a section about Salt Lake City, Utah:

It’s a paradoxical feeling to have in the City of the Saints, since the streets of Salt Lake City are a steppe-like 132 feet wide. This breadth was decreed by Brigham Young so that a team of oxen and a covered wagon might be able to turn around in a full circle unimpeded. (An almost identical pronouncement was attributed to Cecil Rhodes when he was overseeing the layout of the city of Bulawayo in Rhodesia. Is this bit of hypertrophic urban planning just a standard issue paleo-Trumpism? One of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Nineteenth-Century Men with Big Ideas?) The avenues yawn open, human proximity is vanquished, and the nearest people seem alienatingly distant. Such space between souls, such an uninterrupted vista of sky must imbue a populace with a sense of possibility—lebensraum and all that jazz. And yet, walking back to the car from the Castle of Chaos, I think of these teenagers, and they couldn’t look more fettered—a world away from the crowds at the Gatewall Mall, a bi-level outdoor shopping center constructed to look like an Umbrian hill town (if Umbrian hill towns had California Pizza Kitchens). If landscape shapes character, then it is never more clear than here, where I encountered the closest thing resembling a crowd in Salt Lake City. People, many of them in Halloween costumes, stroll eight abreast like one of Brigham Young’s mythic team of oxen, never moving faster than the speed of cold honey. I have never been in a public space in America where a sense of how to walk among others was so completely and confoundingly absent. People stop abruptly, cut across lanes, and generally meander as blissfully unaware as cows in Delhi.

Look at the key components of this paragraph: invocation of a “paradox”; a reference to a short-lived African state and its magnate founder; a sarcastic invocation of a pop-psychology idea with a popular historical reference; a hyphenated neologism skewering a modern businessman; a pretentious and controversial use of a German phrase; an invocation of an underrecognized geographical region of Italy; a reference to historical/mythical Mormon culture; and a reference to the protected status of bovine mammals in Hindu India. That’s a lot of references for a single paragraph, and yet it’s not a rare occurrence for Rakoff, who likes to couch so much of his relatively mundane subject matter with references and allusions to things which are—in fairness—much more interesting.

Still... bitchin' beard

In a turn of events so twistedly appropriate it could not have been planned, Rakoff—a survivor of Hodkins lymphoma in his 20s—was diagnosed with a malignant in his neck during the writing of the book. This revelation and its aftermath comprises the lengthy ending segment at the end of Half Empty, and ultimately one could disregard the entirety of the book except the opening chapter (wherein Rakoff introduces the pessimism-as-defense-mechanism hypothesis) and the last, and the resulting questions to the reader are positively delicious.

First, is it any more appropriate for a author promoting pessimism to be diagnosed with cancer while writing it? Never mind that the actual diagnosis of a malignant tumor (a very slight chance, according to his doctor, who assured him it was likely benign) seems to validate Rakoff’s downcast worldview; imagine for a moment that Rakoff was not already a cancer survivor, and that he had considered his symptoms (pain in the arm, which he noticed after working out) a mild and minor ailment rather than the possible harbinger of a potentially-fatal ailment? Would he still be alive at the time of this writing? And how does a dominantly-negative worldview affect the treatment and recovery of a two-time cancer patient, in a medicinal niche all-too-often dominated by a tired clutch of slogans about “hope”? I’ve talked about this notion before with a friend (in particular, a friend whose father has since been diagnosed with multiple myeloma) who disparages the emphasis on “hope” as a shortcut which avoids the necessary long and hard slog through invasive and terrible treatment, and which undercuts the pragmatism necessary for making decisions which afflicted with a potentially-fatal ailment.

As for the middle chapters of the book, they constitute typical Rakoff fare: they are excellent self-contained pieces, though their inclusion as stepping stones in a book governed by an “organizing principle” (Rakoff’s phrase) isn’t necessarily so much a body of argument as it is a typical body of work by Rakoff. This isn’t surprising: how does one justify one’s own worldview via journalism without, essentially, sounding as one normally does? It is impossible for familiar readers of Rakoff separate argument from author.

For all that, of course, Rakoff remains an impressive journalist, whose breadth of knowledge—and the balls to invoke such knowledge in his work—seems to surpass that of the aforementioned Chuck Klosterman, and without the sniveling pop-culture apologism. Rakoff is an old-school cynic, just old enough to be curmudgeonly and old-fashioned without going Andy Rooney on us. It’s a niche too often unfulfilled between the aged network journalism group and the up-and-coming MTV generation of cultural descriptivists that dominate journalism today.

Masters of Doom by David Kushner

I can still remember buying—as a child of 7 or 8—Doom at the local grocery store; it was $5, and came in the form of two 3.5″ floppy disks. At the time, I had no real inclination what it was, other than than package promised a first-person shooter video game that involve monsters and machine guns. What’s not to like? At the time, I could not have known than I was only one of many tens of thousands—hundreds of thousands—discovering the same phenomenon. Of course, I had only bought the shareware version, which comprised the first of three episodes, and lacked the finances to pay $40 or $50 for the full version, but I played those 9 levels over and over again, and my new obsession also caused me to pluck the first of four novelizations from my dad’s bookshelf. Eventually, I would get the full, expanded Final Doom version of the game, and its followup, Doom II.

I could not have known at the time that one of the most popular games of its era, and a game which launched the first-person shooter genre, was made by a couple of mid-twenties misfits on a houseboat. That John Carmack was a child prodigy of programming. Nor was I quite old enough to understand the shareware phenomenon, or BBSs. Hell, I’m not even sure I heard or appreciated the name “John Carmack” until Doom 3 came out in 2004. I certainly heard of John Romero, the glossy-locked rockstar whose company, Ion Storm, flopped hard with Daikatana in 2000.

David Kushner, publishing in 2003, knew this. It’s fitting, then, that Masters of Doom, a retrospective of the preamble and first decade of id Software, begins with the dual appearance of John Carmack and John Romero at a Quake 3 Tournament in Dallas, the former apparent to preside over his company latest (wildly successful) creation, and the latter to talk about the three-year-late Daikatana. Though Kushner doesn’t reveal it within the introduction, those of us who followed video games know by way of history that Quake 3 was wildly successful and Daitakana fizzled and its creating studio ultimately closed. The two wildly-divergent personalities of “The Two Johns”, now the locus of our attention, will come to inform the entire narrative.

Kushner begins at the beginning, as befits a biographer, and shows us young John Romero, a wild child, who skips out on school to dominate the high score lists at the local arcade, to the increasing consternation of his martial stepfather. And John Carmack, a quiet but brilliant young mind whose thirst for computers and knowledge leads him into trouble—and his frank, contemplative manner leads him to a year in juvenile detention. The two Johns meet at Softdisk, a Shreveport, Louisiana, ISP trying to break into the burgeoning and lucrative computer software market, where they become the stars of the company as they switch from Apple II programming to the novel IBM-PC market. When Romero, ever the über-gamer, finds that Carmack has—in his spare time—recreated Super Mario Bros., smooth-scrolling and all—he immediately decides that he, Carmack, and a few of the best and brightest from Softdisk need to form their own software company, eventually known as id Software.

At one time, this was freaky as shit

Enter Commander Keen, the company’s first shareware title, which made them bucketfuls of money after a deal with Apogee Software—later the now-semi-defunct 3D Realms—and later the wildly successful Wolfenstein 3-D, the paradigm-shattering Doom, and the eponymous first entry in the long-lived Quake franchise. It’s important to remember, of course, that John Carmack was all of 23 years old when Doom was released in 1993; these were, after all, just college dropouts, surviving on diet coke and pizza and living together on a houseboat. Carmack was, in technical terms, the center of the group, as he quietly—robotically, even—churned out game engines of increasing—hell, groundbreaking—sophistication. Romero and an amorphous crew of artists and designs worked up the models, graphics, and content for the games, and then become the testers and cheerleaders for the upcoming release. The pattern that Kushner makes clear is that Romero spent an increasing amount of time dicking around with deathmatches and a lot less time contributing salable content for the company. By the time Quake was released, Carmack had kicked him out.

There are a couple of important points to take away from Masters of Doom:

id Software—and therefore Doom—probably would never have happened without John Romero. After the disaster of Daikatana and Ion Storm and the “John Romero’s about to make you his bitch” magazine ads, it’s easy to think that Romero’s the Skreech of the video game world… perpetually loud, obnoxious, and useless. It’s true that his programming skills probably didn’t advance much beyond the Apple II, after which Carmack did all the hard work, and it’s true that he preferred to spend his time as the dilettante of id Software instead of a productive employee, and its true that his oversexed rockstar mannerisms weren’t even particularly appropriate in the Golden Age of first person shooters. But it’s also true that it was Romero’s enthusiasm—his recognition that Carmack was a bona fide genius—that caused id Software to happen. Without Romero, Carmack may have plugged away at Softdisk for many more years—who’s to say where the state of the art would be without that impetus?

John Carmack is smart. But not very savvy. It’s easy to think of Carmack as the “head” of id Software. And I suppose he is, in the sense that he’s one of the few remaining owners and officially the “technical lead”; but Carmack’s always been in charge of the engine, pushing the limits of current PC hardware to create the most advanced, immersive, realistic environments possible. He’s never been the HR director. But like a lot of technical geniuses, social interaction was never Carmack’s strong suit, and for many years of id’s existence, he simply plugged away at his latest engine, irrespective of the social problems that plagued the company (dark, creative types tend to have personality problems—who knew?), and largely oblivious to the content of the game itself, which was usually left to Romero and the other designers. In other words, Carmack makes the “id Tech” series of game engines as advanced as is possible, and the other stuff simply happens. Or at least that’s the way it used to be; I assume that Carmack has blossomed in the last decade and assumed a more general leadership role in the meantime.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of Doom. It seems dated now—though there are still actively-maintained ports of the original Doom engine—but Doom really did launch an entire generation of games and gamers. Hair-pulling and knee-jerking from Joe Leiberman and other Maude Flanders types aside, the reaction to Doom and the gaming industry it set in motion has been positive and fruitful. One interesting thing to note is Carmack’s attitude toward software patents; supposedly, when advised to patent some particular algorithm or piece of code, he’s pulled the nuclear option, threatening to quit if forced to file for patents. He’s also released the source code for each id Tech engine as GPL a predetermined span after its initial release, essentially giving both the game (absent the copyrighted textures and models) and his algorithms to the developer community. The book doesn’t mention this, even though the original Doom engine was open-sourced as far back as 1997, though it does emphasize Carmack’s desire to make his engines extensible and modifiable by fans.

Masters of Doom is written as a third-person narrative, though it ostensibly draws on a lot of interviews with those involved. This is always a dangerous ground to travel, since one risks attributing thoughts and words to people who never thought or spoke them. Still, Kushner tends to stay away from sensationalism, despite writing the book for the lay person, and though its 2003 publication date already dates it, it serves as an interesting look at the history of one of the most important and innovative software companies in gaming and the strong, strange personalities that made it happen.

The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean

Several years ago I read Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson’s , a book of popular science whose title came from a theory about Napoleon’s botched invasion of Russia during the winter. The theory goes, as Le Couteur and Burreson reported, that the buttons of Napoleon’s soldiers, which were made of tin, turned to powder in the extreme cold, thus exposing their tender torsos to the wind. Though it seems implied, the authors don’t come down strong on either side of the historical reality of this. Though the confluence is in doubt—indeed, it seems unlikely—the individual components of the tale are true: there were a lot of dead Frenchmen that winter, and tin—a perfectly solid metal under normal conditions—does turn into powder in extreme cold.

In The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean revisits this tale, but as a side note to yet another tin tale, namely Robert Scott’s fatal 1910 expedition to the South Pole. Many of his caches of food and fuel, which he left on the initial trip, had leaked in the interim, wasting the kerosene and spoiling the potables onto which it spilled. It’s speculated that the fuel cans, soldered with tin, might have succumbed to what is known as “tin pest”. This, too, is largely speculative; the tin pest problem is apparently too tricky to resolve, even for relatively recent history.

Obviously, it's barely changed in 150 years

But such is the sort of story that Kean likes to reproduce in his new book, a rather jovial romp that uses two main storytelling threads. The first is a history of the periodic table itself, beginning with Mendeleev and his contemporaries and leading all the way to Glenn Seaborg’s reorganization in the mid-20th century. This narrative intertwines with the discovery of elements which fill in or append to the known list; though Kean skips the elements that were known early on—e.g., nitrogen or oxygen—he details the discovery of the more difficult substances such as Aluminium, and certainly all of the trans-uranic elements, whose discoveries paralleled our knowledge of atomic science (and, unfortunately, nuclear weapons).

The second narrative thread is that of anecdotes, wherein Kean relates the funny stories, tricks, and other errata that accompany some of the elements. The name of the book, in fact, derives from a popular chemist prank: spoons made of gallium (which melts at just above room temperature) are served with tea or coffee, and dissolve when uses to stir. Often, these quirky stories are simply part and parcel of the discovery of the element itself; a mine near Ytterby, Sweden, produced no fewer than four eponymous elements: Yttrium, Ytterbium, Terbium, and Erbium; these latter three are all Lanthanides, one of two rows stuck mysteriously at the bottom of the Periodic Table, the way Alaska is shown floating nebulously off to the side of U.S. maps. The Lanthanides and Actinides disrupt the careful lines of the table because of the way electrons behave; the lanthanide series all have to do with the filling of “f-orbitals“, the science of which is beyond me, but which Kean spends no small amount of time explaining. While the f-orbitals are more complicated, the more basic and predictable tenets of electron behavior which govern the chemical properties of elements, such as their propensity to form bonds, are a little easier, and rather important in understanding why the table is arranged the way it is. In this, Kean does the job well enough; it’s difficult writing such concepts for what is essentially a lay audience.

Later elements, of course, necessarily introduce the concept of radiation, and all of the various and grisly stories that go along with it—though Keen tends away from the morbid, eschewing most talk of The Bomb, or the death of the Curies, for instance. Curiously, the race to produce new trans-uranic elements in the lab—even if they exist only for seconds or fractions of a second as they follow a chain of radioactive decay—gets a lot of page space, as Kean brings us up to the state of the art (as of about 2009), which has as much to do with politics now as it did during, say, Germany’s 20th-century dustups or America’s long staring contest with the Soviet Union.

By and large, The Disappearing Spoon is a wonderful little book that is manages to be an entertaining history of the period table and its elements, and a relatively easy [re]introduction to the basic principles of chemistry that make it all happen. I’m a little disappointed that Kean’s history skips over so many primordial elements with their own storied histories and instead focuses a bit too much on the historically-recent quest for synthetic elements, but I suppose that the former has been done before and the latter has not, so perhaps it’s to our benefit that the book mixes historicity with recency.

The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

By the time I read Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind, it had been out for four years, garnered a critical mass of critical acclaim, and been followed up by a sequel both half again as late as expected and half again as long as its predecessor. The Wise Man’s Fear picks up almost exactly where the first book in the series left off. By way of summary: Kvothe, an extraordinarily intelligent and precocious gypsy child is orphaned by the brutal attack of a præternatural group called the Chandrian. His eventual enrollment in a university of engineering and magic lead him on a number of adventures both profitable (in many ways) and detrimental on his way to investigating and avenging the death of his parents. When we last left him, he had inadvertently called the True Name of the wind, which is the purest and most real form of magic.

If you have not read my review of The Name of the Wind, I would suggest doing so in order to understand why, immediately after finishing it, I read The Wise Man’s Fear, and why I felt so compelled and excited to do so. Though the second installment in the series came out a full four years after the first, and this in turn bodes poorly for the timetable of the third and final entry, I could not help but see what Rothfuss had in store for young Kvothe, whom I had, despite my general cynicism, come to care deeply about as a character. Rather than summarize the plot, which is large and intricate, I’ll instead cover some of the major themes, either narrative or responsive.

Kvothe hit puberty?

When dealing with adolescent protagonists as they grow (see: Harry Potter, Bella Swan), authors are left with the difficult task of narrating their eventual entry into the sexual world—either by praxis or imagination—in a way that is both convincing to readers (who, we must bear in mind, are generally familiar with at least one of the two forms) and not damaging to the general tone of the story, if such a danger is even applicable. Thus far, the story of Kvothe has been largely appropriate for all ages, short of its implied violence. Though there were women (all of them superbly attractive and attracted to Kvothe, natch), our young protagonist’s approach has been one of either disinterest or gentlemanly courtesy. Rothfuss must have been faced with the difficult problem of acclimating Kvothe, now 16, to the looming problem of his genitals; either because the author could think of no subtle way to do it or just because he likes narrating sex, Kvothe finds himself trapped in Fae (i.e., the land of the Fairies) with an ancient magical sexbot named Felurian, who teaches him the entire Fairy Kama Sutra of sex techniques, and is enraptured by Kvothe the Virgin’s innate sexual talent. Yes, this is ridiculous as it sounds. Over to Daniel Hemmens:

Felurian is that staple of fantasy novels, the deadly naked sex monster. She’s the most beautiful, most alluring, most sexually attractive woman you’ll ever see, and she will totally kill you with sex.

Felurian is the sirens, and Artemis and pretty much every other sex-death-nudity chick from mythology or fiction rolled into one. Kvothe catches her, bones her, breaks free of her sex-death-nudity mind control, completely whips her ass in a straight fight, then bones her again, then plays music that makes her think he’s awesome, then writes half a song about her that is so awesome that she agrees to let him go so that he can finish it, then disses her sexual prowess, which prompts her to get really insecure and tell him what an amazing lover he is, then they have sex some more, then she sews him a magic cloak, while he goes away and talks to a prophetic tree which turns out to be evil.

Then they have sex some more, then he comes back to the real world and is all “bros, I totally did it with Felurian” and everybody is all like “no way, you’d be mad or dead” and he’s like “no I totally did it with Felurian” and then the hot barmaid from earlier is all like “no he’s definitely telling the truth because I am a woman and I can see that he has got totally sexed up since we last met, because I tried to sex him and it freaked him out, but now it looks like he wouldn’t be freaked out and also he would be totally awesome at sexing.” Then Kvothe does sex with the hot barmaid and he is totally awesome at it, and he explains how doing sex with the hot barmaid is totally as good as doing sex with Felurian, because women are like music and sometimes you want to listen to a beautiful symphony and sometimes you just want a nice simple jig, and by the way this definitely isn’t sexist, and if you think it is then you know nothing about music or love or him.

This last line, apart from being switched from the first to the third person, is a direct quote from the book.

Faced with the notion of introducing Kvothe as Lover (even Kvothe as Legendary Lover), we really have two options: one is to admit Kvothe into the bed of some barmaid or peasant girl, where he stumbles and fumbles his way through the account, only to improve quickly and dramatically with practice. This would be in accordance with Kvothe’s story so far.

The other would be to have Kvothe learn, automagically, everything about sex and the fairer sex from the magical sex goddess. This would, although less in keeping with the tone so far, be an easy deus ex machina for Rothfuss to skirt the issue and have his protagonist emerge from the other side suitably versed in the carnal arts.

As Hemmens notes, however, the solution Rothfuss chooses is—bafflingly—to have Kvothe the young bumbler, Kvothe the romantic idiot, be so innately brilliant at sex that he wooes a centuries-old sex goddess, and still automagically increase his practical knowledge of physical intimacy by manifold. It’s a wild turn toward ridiculous wish-fulfillment fantasy, and the salt to this nasty, gangrenous wound is Kvothe’s time in Ademre, the warrior-culture village where uniformly attractive women have sex as casually as you or I might blow our noses.

This sudden preoccupation with sex commandeers the latter half of the book, even though it seems to serve no purpose; indeed, it fails even to seem prurient or lurid, instead lending a sense of ridicule or burlesque to the book, as though listening to an inadvertently-knowledgeable child talk about how he is going to marry his first-grade crush and pee inside of her.

Whatever happened to the Chandrian?

While Kvothe is spending all his time in bed with every attractive woman in sight (except, notably, his long-time squeeze Denna), he is very obviously not doing what we all expected him to do, which is to continue his obsession with the group of demigods that killed his parents. The Name of the Wind saw Kvothe’s efforts stymied by the censored selection of books available to him in the University; because The Wise Man’s Fear sees him, after 300 pages or so, sent temporarily away from the University to “chase the wind” for a bit, it’s not unreasonable to readers to hope that the story will take our young heroes to exotic locales where he will begin to unravel the mysteries of the evil Chandrian—a search which, we can only assume, will come to a head in the third book.

But there’s almost nothing about the Chandrian to be found in The Wise Man’s Fear. Yes, Kvothe encountered one of their number leading a clutch of bandits; yes, he gets a juicy tidbit about them from the Maer (Mayor?) of Vint, for whom he is a servant for a long period of time. But our expectations—that we would know more about the Chandrian on page 900 than we did on page 1—are unfounded.

By the end of the book, we’ve established that Kvothe

• Is good at sex (and likes it)
• Learns how to fight from an Adem mercenary
• Is still in the Friend Zone with his crush, Denna.
• Is getting better at True Names, even though he still only uses them during extreme duress.

But that’s it. Kvothe just increases his powers and talents incrementally, as though we’re watching Rothfuss level up a World of Warcraft character.

Oh, I get it… Kvothe isn’t so great after all…

Though I noticed the trend during the first book, I saved its mention for this review because the notion really becomes apparent during The Wise Man’s Fear; namely, the initial impression we are given of Kvothe—a legend in his own time, rivaling Taborlin the Great—seems less and less truthful as he tells his story. Some bits of rumor or dispelled outright as Kvothe tells the corresponding true story behind some ridiculous bit of fiction; other times, it’s simply implied that a distant reference is being countered by a suspiciously similar and reasonably less fantastical one. What’s more, the “current” Kvothe (who is relating his story to The Chronicler) has been designed by Rothfuss to be a dejected, largely powerless schmuck who doesn’t at all resemble the fiery-spirited Kvothe of the story.

In other words, the initial disparity that Rothfuss creates, which causes readers to desire to understand why the Kvothe legend and the real Kvothe seem so different, may not simply be due to an RPG-like progression of skills and power as we might assume; it might, in fact, be an unfortunate misunderstanding all along, and that Kvothe the Narrator is still a schmuck who simply happens to have a good memory and is pretty good at sympathetic magic. That would—ha ha!—be a clever deconstruction of fantasy tropes and our linear expectations of power and character, although it would certainly make for a disappointing story. All of this remains to be seen, of course, and despite what seems like a number of deep faults with the second installment in the series, I find myself anxiously awaiting the conclusion.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

The Name of the Wind came up, a little unexpectedly, on a list of the top 100 or so science fiction and fantasy books of all time. These are about as common as oxygen nowadays, but this particular list was from NPR, so I stopped to read. Among the obvious Tolkien, Heinlein, Herbert, Orwell, and other thoroughly entrenched authors were some surprises. I first learned of Gene Wolf’s The Book of the New Sun, which was new to me but an old book with its sci-fi bona fides. Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind was more puzzling, being the debut novel of an unknown writer, published a mere four years ago. My curiosity was piqued.

It would be a mistake to say that Rothfuss breaks new ground with The Name of the Wind, the first part of a planned trilogy called The Kingkiller Chronicles. To the contrary, most of the appeal of Rothfuss is that, as a well-versed fan of science fiction and fantasy, he knows to cherry-pick the most interesting bits of all his various and sundry interests. The result is a mélange of influences, for better or worse.

This is a dangerous game to play. Christopher Paolini, author of the Inheritance cycle which ended this year, wrote from a similar position, and while the books were certainly successful, they were also uniformly awful—an uninspired pastiche of Middle Earth, Star Wars, and Pern. Because there was nothing unique about the books, and the characters similarly uncompelling (I found myself wishing for the untimely death of no smaller number of them), they were little more than lengthy Tolkien fan-fiction. From the very beginning, we knew that Eragon would eventually beat the evil Galbatorix; since the plot itself was invented by Paolini on the fly to suit whatever ends he felt at the time, the muddled mess in between Eragon’s discovery of a dragon egg and the final battle of the fourth books was narrative masturbation.

Rothfuss handles this with significantly more grace—or at least he does so far. The series is told as an extended flashback; from the very beginning, readers know that Kvothe, the hero with flaming red hair, is a living legend. We don’t know what he’s done, aside from a few tall tales, but we can intuit from the name of the series that regicide will ultimately be involved. We also come to understand, early on, that Kvothe is now living as an innkeeper under the assumed name of Kote. A strange and compelling scene indeed. Eventually, Kvothe relates his story for posterity to a writer named The Chronicler, and the book is mostly told as a story, punctuated by interludes in the present.

By way of a brief plot summary: Kvothe’s story begins when he is young boy, traveling with his family as part of a collective group of musicians and performers known as the Edema Ruh (think of gypsies, negative connotations and all). When a magician (“sympathist”) briefly traveled with them, the precocious Kvothe learns about magic and science. When his entire troupe is slaughtered by an ancient group of bogeymen known as the Chandrian, young Kvothe becomes a street urchin in the large city of Tarbean, homeless and wretched, before he finds his way to The University, which teaches sympathetic magic and other, more mundane topics. The rest of the book details Kvothe’s first few terms at the University.

This all sounds perfectly mundane, but I found myself drawn to Rothfuss’ story; I couldn’t put it down until I finished it, and I’m not the only one. The reasons are subtle, but important.

Whence Kvothe? Since we know immediately that at some point, Kvothe becomes legendary, with apparently unrivaled power, it’s important as readers for us to understand how he goes from a smart and precocious child to the stuff of myths. Especially when Kvothe spends much of the book desperately poor, beaten up, fearing for his life or his status in the University; even by the end of The Name of the Wind, the Kvothe we know doesn’t begin to approach Kvothe qua Legend. It’s a trap that Rothfuss sets; until this disparity between our a priori knowledge of Kvothe and the story of Kvote as Narrator is resolved, there’s a dramatic tension that holds us. A lot—even too much—time is spent with Kvothe worrying about his money as he lives a penny at the time.

Everyone loves ginger kids.... right?

Magic done right. Magic is easy to write, but it’s also boring. Anybody can cast Magic Missile; that, for instance, Harry Potter can wave his wand and do just about anything, makes the magic itself that much less compelling. Rothfuss’ approach to the topic, then, splits into a number of fronts. The more mundane kind of magic, known as “sympathy”, is a blend of traditional magic and more modern ideas like thermodynamics or quantum entanglement. A sympathist (not a magician) uses magic to link two similar objects; by using a handful of ash from a roaring fire, for instance, a sympathist can use its heat to start a fire even when spatially distant from said fire. The quality of the link depends on the similarity from the items, and when desperate, a sympathist can use the heat from their own blood to power a spell. This is a tricky form of magic whose uses and drawbacks aren’t immediately obvious, and so we can’t necessarily predict when or how Kvothe will be able to use them.

A love story, sort of. It’s not too long before Kvothe introduces Denna, a young girl about his age who is likewise a wanderer. The relationship is frustrating to readers because Kvothe remains solidly in the “Friend Zone” while Denna is courted by tens (hundreds?) of men and patrons; yet it is obvious to readers (and even to the characters themselves) that they’re crazy about each other. When Kvothe the Narrator first introduces the subject, however, he does so with an import that implies his relationship with Denna (who is only ever referred to in the past tense) will come to mean a lot more than the romantic-comedy foibles Rothfuss gives us in the first book.

Chicks dig rock stars. Perhaps the most unique—perhaps I should simply say “surprising”?—aspect of Kvothe’s story is that Kvothe is a highly skilled lute player, actor, and singer. His instrument of choice—a lute—features heavily in the story, and is the catalyst for his meeting Denna. Rothfuss’ invented world is gaga for musicians, and Kvothe’s performances routinely move people to tears and/or wild applause; this is perhaps a little difficult to swallow, but we accept it because Rothfuss is at least consistent in his treatment of the subject.

There’s magic, and then there’s magic. I’ve already talked about sympathetic magic, which is a compromise between traditional fantasy thaumaturgy and steampunk science; in fact, the two meet more obviously in the art of “artificing”, which involves engineering mechanical objects which utilize sympathetic magic to do things—”sympathy lamps”, for instance, which use small amounts of the bearer’s body heat to produce a flameless light. But there’s another kind of magic to be had which is more important in Kvothe’s case. A widely-told legend in Kvothe’s universe is that of Taborlin the Great, who “knew the names of all things”; by “names”, we mean of course “True Names”, which is a convenient label for a metaphysical understanding of an object, and which has been used to greater or lesser degree in both other fantasy novels and in real-world myths and legends. Kvothe’s first knowledge of this comes when he botches a sympathetic link and essentially suffocates himself when learning magic from the wandering sympathist in the beginning of the book. The sympathist, who knows that Name of the Wind (you see?), called upon it to undo the binding. From that point forward, Kvothe seeks the Name of the Wind, and it isn’t until the end of the book that he calls it very much by accident and falls under the tutelage of the quirky Master Elodin, the University’s Master Namer.

All of these unsolved mysteries, taken as a whole, are enough to make The Name of the Wind extraordinarily compelling. There’s no small amount that Rothfuss does wrong in his writing, and I hesitate to say that The Kingkiller Chronicles will enter into the fantasy canon, but there’s no denying that the first book in the series is an engaging, playful, thorough beginning to what I hope will be an equally thrilling series.

Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp

Die Hard has been one of my favorite movies since on first saw it on TV as a child; it sparked my love affair with Bruce Willis and with antiheroes in general. When, only a few years later, I stood in a used book store in Fremont, Nebraska, and read the back cover of a old book called Nothing Lasts Forever and thought “Hunh, this sounds familiar” before putting it back on the shelf, I had no idea that Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel was, in fact, the inspiration for Willis’ break-out movie.

There’s a lot of similarities; there’s still a bored cop stuck in a highrise with a clutch of Teutonic terrorists; he still winds up shoeless and lacerated; he still talks to a black cop named Al Powell via CB radio. Other things are changed; instead of an estranged wife, Joe Leland (not John McClane) is visiting his estranged daughter Stephanie. Instead of a middle-aged (late-30s?), wisecracking nobody, our protagonist is actually a retired policeman who’s kind of a big deal in the security world; so McClane/Leland goes from being young and unimportant to old and famous and well-versed in tactics and gunplay.

The effect here is twofold: first, there’s a sense of geriatric anger and frustration that imbues Leland’s thoughts that is entirely disjoint from McClane’s alternating fear and snarky comments; second, Leland responds viscerally to killing in a way that McClane doesn’t. Both characters break the neck of their first terrorist; McClane does it by tossing a blond German down the stairs, where he lies still, but Leland does it by narrating how he places his shoulder at the back of the neck, shifts his weight, and feels the popping separation—then he vomits.

In Nothing Lasts Forever, the corporation, Klaxon Oil, is basically funneling money into a South American dictatorship; the terrorists, then, are actually leftist guerrillas, after a fashion, and their entire plot does seem to entail disrupting Klaxon’s operations, publicizing their crimes, and blowing $6 million in cash onto the streets of L.A. The makers of Die Hard actually make fun of that motivation by having leftist politics serve as a red herring so that the terrorists can steal bearer bonds and “sit on a beach, earning 20%”. I suppose the idea lost merit in the intervening decade between the book’s release and the filming of the movie.

In these respects, Nothing Lasts Forever represents a more subtle work that spends time cultivating the motivations of its characters; Leland spends no small amount of time reminiscing about his marriage and divorce, the eventual death of his ex-wife, his career as a security consultant, and more importantly, the preconditions and effects of violence. At the beginning of the book, when Leland flourishes his Browning at an irate taxi driver to make it to his flight on time, Thorp was actually giving us the first of many meditations on our disposition to violence. If Leland had not been so quick to pull his gun in order to solve a problem, he may have missed his flight; he would then not be trapped in a highrise fighting twelve armed terrorists. If he hadn’t put up armed resistance, would the terrorists have killed as many people as they did? In the movie, it’s clear that the terrorists planned to blow up their hostage to cover their escape, but the notion is left in doubt in the book, given the gloss of “freedom fighter” mystique that clashes with the terrorists cold-blooded-murder personas. In other words, Nothing Lasts Forever is a short pulp novel which is actually a sustained inquiry into the repercussions of easy violence, even if only threatened or implied.

Reginald VelJohnson is born to play cops

One notable deficit is that because the authorial voice is third-person, but not omniscient (that is, it’s limited to Leland’s knowledge), we miss out on the characterization of Hans Gruber (Anton “Little Tony” Gruber in the book) as done so brilliant by Alan Rickman. In the book, Gruber is a throwaway villain, just as the other terrorists, and even much of the action, is itself throwaway in the manner of so many action pulps of the Don Pendleton variety. Al Powell—in the book a baby-faced rookie—is similarly one-dimensional, little more than a voice on the radio, rather than an empathetic character with his own backstory.

Nothing Lasts Forever, then, is a more subtle work in the sense that its approach to its hero as a sad, lonely older man makes for a rather unique hero, and his framing of the villains as violent (approaching sadistic) leftist Robin Hoods introduces doubt into the neat good/bad binary that we like to expect from pulpy action stories; it is also, however, a thinner and less substantial work in that its cast of supporting characters is one-dimensional, and its narration therefore spirals into mopey solipsism. Nothing Lasts Forever is simply sad; it begins with a sad man regretting the loss of his relationships, and ends with a bloody, critically-injured man regretting the loss of even more relationships and questioning whether his heroism actually cost more lives than it saved. I’m left with no doubt that the film version is better, but I can’t quite decide if the book is good in the first place. I suppose that means Thorp did something right.