Jim Geraghty in his morning email informs us that Gary Lucas has not learned to leave well enough alone.

If you were thinking, “Well, at least George Lucas has stopped messing around with the one work of film he got right the first time, and that he could never ruin through gratuitous edits and silly changes,” well, you were wrong.

Lord!

photo: Madolan

Riverside, Iowa.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

One recent day at Disneyland….

Hat tip to Leah Libresco.

Spanish edition: The Last Ringbearer — Discover the Other Side of the Legend

History is written by the winners, we all know. A mischievous Russian biologist and Tolkien fan named Kyrill Eskov decided to attempt to imagine the history of the concluding years of Third Age of Middle Earth from the perspective of the losing side.

As far back as 1999, he published a nearly 300-page alternative-to-the-Lord-of-the-Rings-version, titled The Last Ringbearer. The Eskov Ring was subsequently published in a number of other major European languages, but the closely-allied-to-the-Valar Tolkien estate idealistically has absolutely blocked its publication in English.

Finally, Yisroel Markov, a Manager of Investment Reporting at Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management, completed his own English translation (batted out over “a few dozen lunch hours”). He ran his translation past the author for correction and approval, and then made it non-commercially available on-line last December.

Laura Miller reviewed it in Salon.

Eskov treats the Tolkien version of Middle Earth history as pious myth and propaganda. The real conflict, in his version, was between the anti-technological Gandalf using barbarous and brigandish men as his cats’ paws against the rational and scientific civilization of Mordor.

Mordor, as you see, is much more favorably portrayed:

Barad-Dur rose six centuries ago, that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle Earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic. The shining tower of the Barad-Dur citadel rose over the plains of Mordor almost as high as Orodruin like a monument to Man – free Man who had politely but firmly declined the guardianship of the Dwellers on High and started living by his own reason. It was a challenge to the bone-headed aggressive West, which was still picking lice in its log ‘castles’ to the monotonous chanting of scalds extolling the wonders of never-existing Númenor. It was a challenge to the East, buckling under the load of its own wisdom, where Ying and Yang have long ago consumed each other, producing only the refined static beauty of the Thirteen Stones Garden. And it was a challenge to a certain someone else, for the ironic intellectuals of the Mordor Academy, unbeknownst to them, have come right up to the line beyond which the growth of their power promised to become both irreversible and uncontrollable.

And Gandalf and Saruman are also a bit different.

Arnor, the Tower of Amon Súl
November, year 3010 of the Third Age

“A state that is unable to feed itself and is dependent on food imports cannot be considered a formidable foe.”

Those words were uttered by a tall white-bearded old man in a silvery-gray cloak with its hood thrown back; he stood with his fingertips resting on the surface of a black oval table, surrounded by four people in high-backed armchairs, half in shadow. By some signs, his speech had been a success and the Council was on his side, so now the piercing dark blue eyes of the standing man, which contrasted starkly with the parchment-yellow skin of his face, were focused on only one of the four – the one he would have to battle now. That man, huddling tightly in his blinding-white cloak, sat at a slight distance, as if already separating himself from the rest of the Council; he appeared to have a strong fever. Presently he straightened out, clutching the chair arms, and his deep and smooth voice sounded under the dark ceiling:

“Have you any pity on them?”

“On whom?”

“On the people, Gandalf, the people! As I understand it, you have just sentenced the civilization of Mordor to death, in the name of the higher good. But any civilization consists of people, so they would have to be exterminated, completely, with no chance of recovery. Right?”

“Pity is a poor adviser, Saruman. Haven’t you looked in the Mirror with the rest of us?”

Gandalf pointed to the large object in the middle of the table, which looked most like a huge bowl full of quicksilver. “There are many roads to the future, but whichever of them Mordor takes, no later than three centuries hence it will access the forces of Nature that no one will be able to harness. Would you like to once again watch them turn the entire Middle Earth and Far West into ashes, in a blink of an eye?”

“You are correct, Gandalf, and it would be dishonest to deny such a possibility. But then you should exterminate the Dwarves, too: they have already wakened the Terror of the Deep once, and it took all our magic to prevent it from escaping. You know that those bearded tightwads are mulishly stubborn and not inclined to learn from their mistakes…”

“All right, let us not speak of what is possible, and speak only of the inevitable. If you do not wish to look into the Mirror, look at the smoke rising from their coal furnaces and copper refineries. Walk the salt pans into which they have turned the lands west of Núrnen and try to find one living plant on those half-a-thousand square miles. But make sure not to do it on a windy day, when salty dust rises like a wall over the plain of Mordor, choking everything in its path… And note that they have done all that barely out of the crib; what do you think they will do later?”

“Gandalf, a child is always a disaster in the house. First dirty diapers, then broken toys; later, the family clock taken apart; to say nothing of what happens when he grows up a bit. A house without children, on the other hand, is a model of cleanliness and order, yet somehow its owners are usually not too happy about that, especially as they age.”

“Saruman, always have I been amazed by your cunning ability to turn another’s words inside out, and disprove obvious truths via sly casuistry. But by the Halls of Valinor! it will not work now. The Middle Earth population is now a multitude of peoples living in harmony with nature and the heritage of their ancestors. These people and their entire way of life are now under a dire threat, and my duty is to avert it at all costs. A wolf plundering my sheep has its own reasons for doing so, but I have no intent of figuring them out!”

“I am, by the way, no less concerned with the fate of the Gondorians and the Rohirrim than you are; but I look further into the future. Do you, a member of the White Council, not know that the totality of magical knowledge by its very nature can not grow beyond what was once received from Aulë and Oromë? You can lose it quicker or slower, but no one has the power to reverse the loss. Every generation of wizards is weaker than the previous one; sooner or later men will face Nature alone. And then they will need Science and Technology – provided you haven’t eradicated those by then.”

“They don’t need your science, for it destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!”

“Strange is the talk of Soul and Harmony on the lips of a man who is about to start a war. As for science, it is dangerous not to them, but to you – or, rather, to your warped self esteem. What are we wizards but consumers of that which our predecessors have created, while they are creators of new knowledge? We face the Past, they face the Future. You have once chosen magic, and therefore will never cross the boundaries set by the Valar, whereas in their science the growth of knowledge – and hence, power – is truly unlimited. You are consumed by the worst kind of envy – that of a craftsman for an artist… Well, I suppose this is a weighty enough reason for murder; you’re neither the first nor the last.”

“You don’t believe this yourself,” Gandalf shrugged calmly.

“No, I suppose I do not,” Saruman shook his head sadly. “You know, those who are motivated by greed, lust for power, or wounded pride are half-way tolerable, at least they feel pangs of conscience sometimes. But there is nothing more fearsome than a bright-eyed enthusiast who’d decided to benefit mankind; such a one can drown the world in blood without hesitation. Those people’s favorite saying is: ‘There are things more important than peace and more terrible than war’ – I believe you’ve heard this one, no?”

“I accept the responsibility, Saruman; History will vindicate me.”

“I have no doubt that it will; after all, history will be written by those who will win under your banner. There are tried and true recipes for that: cast Mordor as the Evil Empire that wished to enslave the entire Middle Earth, and its inhabitants as non-human monsters that rode werewolves and ate human flesh…”

Eskov continues the pattern of debunking. Aragorn is a cynical and conniving schemer. Hobbits do not even exist. Nor do Nazgul.

[Correction: It never pays to post on books one has not finished, sigh. Yes, there are Nazgul. But, the major figure who gets killed in the Battle of the Fields of Pellenor is not the Chief Nazgul. See below.]

Compelled unwillingly to initiate war by raids on its vital food caravans crossing the fords of Osgiliath, Mordor tries desperately for a blitzkrieg victory, but on the field of Pellenor the Mordorian cause begins to appear doubtful as a force of zombies arrives at the army’s rear. The Southern Mordorian Commander hastened to the point of crisis.

A phalanx six deep and about a hundred men across moved unhurriedly across the field in total silence. The warriors were dressed in gray cloaks with hoods covering their faces, and were armed only with long narrow Elvish swords; they had no armor, no helmets, not even shields. There was something weirdly out of place about the soldiers in the forward rank,
and it took the commander a few seconds to understand what that was: they were literally studded with three-foot Umbarian arrows, but kept advancing just the same. They were commanded by a horseman in their rear, wearing a tattered camouflage cloak of a Dúnadan ranger, his faceplate closed. The sun was almost directly overhead, yet the horseman cast a long coal-black shadow, while the phalanx cast no shadow at all.

An aide reported to Commander-South that neither cavalry nor the mûmakil were able to breach the ranks of those warriors; the animals became wildly uncontrollable on approach. In the meantime, the invincible phalanx kept pushing northwest – fortunately, rather slowly. …

When the Commander-South neared the phalanx, his mount reared and almost tossed him from the saddle. Now he could see the enemy warriors clearly and knew that the numerous ‘panic-mongers’ were right. These were, indeed, the living dead: respectable-looking parchment-skinned mummies with eyes and mouths carefully sewn shut; horribly bloated drowned men dripping greenish goo; skeletons covered with tatters of blackened skin, cause of death now indeterminable to the best pathologist. The corpses stared at him, and a chillingly terrifying low growl went up; such is the growl of a sheepdog about to go for the enemy’s throat. The general had no time to be terrified, though – a dozen gray figures have already detached themselves from the rear right corner of the formation, clearly intending to block his way to the indecisively halted Dúnadan, so he spurred the stallion again.

He broke through the line of the dead with surprising ease: they turned out to be rather slow and no match for a fighter of his caliber one-on-one. A hanged man with a lolling tongue and bulging eyes had barely raised his sword when Commander-South sliced through his sword-arm with a lighting-fast horizontal flick of his wrist and then cut the enemy almost in half from the right shoulder down. The others backed away for some reason and made no more attempts to stop him. Meanwhile the Dúnadan was clearly deciding whether he should fight or run, and seeing that he had no chance of escaping, dismounted decisively and drew his Elvish sword. So that’s how you want it, eh? Fight on foot – fine. Shouting the traditional: “Defend yourself, fair sir!” the commander of the South Army jumped nimbly off his horse, thinking in passing that this northern bandit hardly deserved to be called ‘sir.’ The phalanx had already moved away a hundred yards or so and kept going; seven of the undead stood in the distance, not taking their unseeing eyes off the duelists; a ringing silence fell.

He suddenly realized with a clarity that amazed him that this one duel will determine the outcome not only of this battle, but the fate of entire Middle Earth for many years to come. His inner voice then said in an eerily pleading tone: “Think this through, while there’s still time! Please!” – as if trying to warn him without knowing how. But he had thought this through already! They are both lightly armored, so his curved scimitar will have a clear advantage over any straight western sword; the guy doesn’t seem to be a leftie, so no surprises there; it would’ve been better to fight on horseback, but let’s not be greedy… It’s all set – ready to serve, as the saying goes!

The Dúnadan awaited him without trying to maneuver: knees slightly bent, upraised sword held in both hands, hilt against the belt buckle; all his earlier indecisiveness was gone. The general quickly approached to within about seven paces, right up to the maximum reach of the northerner, and started feinting: right, left, then his favorite distracting move – a quick pass of the scimitar to the left hand and back…

A terrible blow in the back felled him. He managed to twist sideways (“Spine’s still there…”), lifted his head and thought distantly: yes, I have underestimated those deaders… so they can move real fast and real silent when needed… northern bastard… Amazingly, he managed to get up to one knee, using the scimitar as a crutch; the corpses, having already
surrounded him, stood still with swords raised, awaiting word from their commander. The latter was in no hurry; pushing the helmet to the back of his head and chewing on a straw, he gazed at his fallen foe with interest. Then his calm soft voice broke the silence:

“Welcome, Commander-South! I knew that you would come for a one-on-one fight, as is the custom by you nobles,” he smirked, “I was only concerned that you wouldn’t dismount, like I did. Had you kept to the saddle, it all could have been different… I’m glad that I didn’t overestimate you, fair sir.”

“You cheated.”

“You fool! I came here to win this war and the crown of Gondor, not some stupid duel. As Tulkas is my witness, I have often played heads-or-tails with death, but always for a goal, never for the hell of it.”

“You cheated,” repeated Commander-South, trying not to cough with the blood from his pierced lung slowly pooling in his mouth. “Even the knights of the North will not shake your hand.”

“Of course they won’t,” laughed the Dúnadan, “since they will be kneeling before the new King of Gondor! I beat you in an honest fight, one on one – so it shall be written in all the history books. As for you, they won’t even remember your name, I’ll make sure of that. Actually,” he stopped in midstride, hunting for the stirrup, “we can make it even more interesting: let you be killed by a midget, some tiny little dwarf with hairy paws. Or by a broad… yes, that’s how we’ll do it.”

What a scoundrel!

This is about as far as I’ve gotten so far, but it is apparent that the real protagonists are going to be a field medic from Umbar and an Orocuin recon scout. It seems unfair to wait for me to finish the whole thing before sharing the news and the link.

My own guess is that Tolkien would not have much liked Eskov’s pastiche and would have considered his perspective unsound, but I think he would have declined to block its publication.

Последний кольценосец, 1999.

A 2000 essay by Eskov on why he wrote his alternative history.

Yisroel Markov’s English translation.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Scrooge McDuck and his nephew Donald were responsible for some pretty impressive cultural contributions.

Hat tip to Jose Guardia.

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According to Jay Black, Nathan Fillion is television’s Martin Luther.

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When the alien invaders arrive…

Ferdinand Bardamu thinks that contemporary Western society is too clever by half, though not nearly intelligent enough, and argues that cleverness is considerably over-rated.

Most of the people and cultures we think of as smart are merely clever. The Chinese and Japanese are entire races of clever sillies, which is why China will never become a superpower (despite the braying of the self-appointed “experts”) and why Japan has been stuck in a recession ever since the 80′s, when those same “experts” said that THEY would take over the world. Clever sillies…. are problematic because they justify the life-destroying, culture-wrecking idiocies they push with their “smartness.” Feminism, socialism, neoliberalism, multiculturalism, political correctness – all of them are pushed by clever sillies who are witty enough to implement a policy but too stupid to understand why it’s a bad idea. (Note: I don’t exclude myself from this analysis. I’m willing to admit that I’m not that smart.)

This is a big part of the reason why I am so hard on nerds. Nerdiness is, at its core, a manifestation of clever silliness. Nerds and their fellow travelers conflate cleverness and intelligence and suffer – and make everyone else around them suffer – because of it. Being able to do complex math in your head or invent elaborate theories about the hidden meanings of Star Trek episodes does not make you smart, they just mean you’re good at wasting your brainpower on things that don’t matter. Modern society encourages cleverness and punishes intelligence, which is why Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner direct the American economy while the people who could actually fix the recession are virtual unknowns.

His comments were provoked by Alte‘s observation that too much intelligence seems to spell doom for a society.

There is a definite point where the benefits of additional intelligence are outweighed by the associated decline in female fertility. Once a population crosses a certain “IQ limit”, it begins to shrink dramatically and sink into massive debt (in an attempt to sustain its living standard despite a declining population). At that point, those of lower IQ will begin to outbreed those of higher IQ, the country will default on its debts, and enter a period of economic decline and austerity. This is simply the natural ebb-and-flow of civilization. Civilizational leadership then passes on to the next “up-and-coming” region (currently Oceania, then the BRICs [Brazil, Russia, India, China –JDZ], then Africa).

The late James Oliver Rigney, Jr. aka Robert Jordan

Zach Baron, in Believer magazine, commemorates the impending publication of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series’s penultimate, and second posthumous, installment, Towers of Midnight with an appreciative essay.

Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, in my own view, is the only fantasy series that could sensibly be described as a worthy successor to Tolkien’s LOTR. Jordan produced an epic tale, astonishingly entertaining and rewarding and filled with persuasive invention, aptly grounded in traditional myth and story, that became simultaneously also a colossal literary train wreck which somehow spun completely out of control, while remaining compelling reading.

Readers who followed along were happy but thoroughly frustrated by the author’s refusal to wind up plot line arcs that had readers perched on the edge of their chairs within the succeeding volume arriving after an interval of years. Jordan’s readers suffered terribly from Epic interruptus.

Blood, salvation, eternal life in posterity. Though he couldn’t have known it at the time, Jordan had written his own mortal predicament into the Wheel of Time. The series’s most poignant paradoxes—the taxing wear of responsibility on those who influence the weaving of the world, death as precondition for redemption—seeped into Jordan’s real life at its end, as he belatedly faced a mockingly close approximation of the same ambivalently grim fate as the characters he wrote about. …

[I]t’s Rand’s path that Jordan ultimately walked. Both men labored to succeed in spite of bearing an affliction that would presumably kill them; both faced an uphill battle to the finish—Rand, to unite the Wheel of Time’s various nations and peoples against the forces of evil, and Jordan, in his last eighteen months, to get Rand’s story on paper before it was too late.

Most heartbreakingly, Jordan slowed the pace of his novels down to a crawl toward the end, as if keeping his imaginary world alive might keep him alive, too.

Weaving the ever more complex strands of plot and characters was a task that increasingly defeated the Wheel of Time’s author. Simultaneously, his fictional proxy’s early triumphs (pulling an Excalibur-like sword from a fortress called the Stone, killing about one bad guy per book) shaded, in time, toward the ambivalent, the incomplete, and the downright disastrous. As the series wore on, the pace of the installments became sluggish as Jordan’s attention divided. His main characters, Rand foremost among them, began disappearing from the books in which they were ostensibly the heroes.

This moment—roughly, books seven through ten (A Crown of Swords, The Path of Daggers, Winter’s Heart, and Crossroads of Twilight), plus the prequel—is arguably one of the most bizarrely boring stretches in any kind of contemporary fiction. Rand dallies with a lover, and deals with various tepid rebellions, humdrum political complications, and distant foreign incursions. Mat, a lothario and gambler who at this point has emerged as the books’ most entertaining character, gets stranded in a city and hangs out there. Perrin, whose wife is captured by an unfriendly army in the eighth book, spends the next 1,600 pages or so trying to get her back. Together, the four books are a study in inertia, and they prompted many to suggest that Jordan was intentionally drawing out the series for cash or, worse, that he had absolutely no idea how to end what he’d begun.

But though it is absolutely true that these two-thousand-plus pages could’ve been compressed by an editor less kind than his own wife into a single book, it would be wrong to suggest Jordan dilated out of avarice, or lack of preparation. The problem was that Jordan’s strengths as a writer were also his weaknesses. He abhorred instrumental characters, the stock pawns of the genre, there to be set up and knocked down to move the plot along. And he hated being obvious, choosing instead to subtly foreshadow plot developments whole books in advance (then ridiculing readers who couldn’t quite put the pieces together). Most of all, Jordan loved his own creations, good and evil alike, and wrote circles around them, developing their respective psychologies and romantic entanglements at what became a laughably immersive, infinitesimal pace. The rest of the world, he seemed to be saying, would just have to wait.

In fact, it ended up outlasting Jordan himself.

Mazlan Othman

The United Nations is ready.

News.Com.Au:

THE United Nations was set today to appoint an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist to act as EarthÂ’s first contact for any aliens that may come visiting.

Mazlan Othman, the head of the UN’s little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), is to describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society’s Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire.

She is scheduled to tell delegates that the recent discovery of hundreds of planets around other stars has made the detection of extraterrestrial life more likely than ever before – and that means the UN must be ready to coordinate humanity’s response to any “first contact”.

During a talk Othman gave recently to fellow scientists, she said: “The continued search for extraterrestrial communication, by several entities, sustains the hope that some day humankind will receive signals from extraterrestrials.

“When we do, we should have in place a coordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject. The UN is a ready-made mechanism for such coordination.”

Professor Richard Crowther, an expert in space law and governance at the UK Space Agency and who leads British delegations to the UN on such matters, said: “Othman is absolutely the nearest thing we have to a ‘take me to your leader’ person.”

PanzerBlitz, designed by Jim Dunnigan in 1969, was the best of the Avalon Hill games.

Charles S. Roberts passed away recently from emphysema at 80 years of age. Roberts was best known as a historian of American railroads, but in 1954 he took advantage of his professional experience in printing and advertising to found the game company Avalon Hill in 1954.

Avalon Hill created an entire new war gaming hobby with its board games based on historical events. AH’s crucial innovations included the use of a grid overlaid on a flat folding map, zones of control (ZOC), an odds-based combat results table (CRT), and terrain effects on movement, troop strength, morale.

The earliest games were primitive, featuring large and arbitrary units, a rectangular grid offering overly limited movement and possibilities of unit interaction, and thoroughly unbalanced scenarios.

AH’s publication of PanzerBlitz, designed by the legendary Jim Dunnigan, in 1969 represented a design breakthough featuring a hexagonal map grid, tactical level units, and multiple typically far more balanced scenarios.

Dunnigan went on to operate Simulations Publications, a rival company that eclipsed Avalon Hill and created a new era in simulations gaming.

Baltimore Sun obituary

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Fighting one’s way to the vital Russian village of Bednost (Poverty)

Max Fisher, Jesse Klein, and Daniel Dresner debate this burning issue in the Atlantic.

Despite some confusion resulting from George Lucas’s muddled Californian sensibilities, I think it is quite clear in the original Star Wars (1977) that the rebellion was in defense of a senatorial republic overthrown by an evil Emperor, and that the disorders used as an excuse for the tyrant’s seizure of power were occasioned by resistance to government measures being employed to enforce trade guild monopolies upon outlying planets.

Fighting to restore limited government and free trade ought to make the Jedi libertarians. Though I do admit that all that mystical Force talk does make it seem like California is their home planet.