For Freedom! (not 9/11 themed)

[I didn't bother with a commemoration because the sun never set on 11 September 2001, by my lights.]

The genius of the Flashman novels is that the protagonist has no volition, no agency in his own story; his adventures happen to him as he follows the path of least resistance.  This invites the reader to identify with the hero and to feel as if the adventures are happening to him as well: if Flashman makes no decisions, then he makes no decisions that you yourself would not have made in his place.

In Flash for Freedom this gimmick takes a strange turn.  Flashman is first employed unwittingly in the slave trade, then rooked into service as conductor on the Underground Railroad, then he finds work as a slave-driver, then he is pressed into slavery himself!  What am I to make of this?  A more conventional novel would surely present the turnabout as Rod Serling-esque comeuppance, but Flashman doesn’t get comeuppance.  He’s an amoral creature in an amoral universe.  Rather, the reader [this reader, at any rate] feels invited to participate in the story as a slaver and even to enjoy whipping slaves along with Flashman as he vents his frustrations and raises the cotton yield to boot.

Flashman isn’t just an anachronism.  He’s political pornography in the modern age.  I’ll hang on to my copies tightly because I’m not confident they’ll be legal to buy or even own in another ten years, First Amendment or no.

Watch the Skies!

I’m enjoying Flashman and the Mountain of Light now that the plot has moved at last from sex to violence.  The author has found a terrific formula for his sword-and-pistol Romance: the less Flashman enjoys his predicaments, the more I do.  Imagine if Tintin’s adventures had all happened to Captain Haddock instead.  Why haven’t these books been put to film?

Reading a Victorian adventure naturally brings to mind that queer new(ish) trend, the VSF, profiled recently in the New York Times [so you know it's on the way out--remember ska?].  I arrived at Sky Galleons of Mars late, and never shed a tear for the sunset of the British Empire; still, the romance of the setting is undeniable.  Who could argue with a giant heliograph orbiting Mars?  You could see it at night from Earth, signaling home!

Another late arriver (arriviste?) to the setting is Catalyst Game Labs, with their yet-unveiled Leviathans offering. Leviathans was a good name for a floating battleship game; the false etymology given by the “levi-” as in levitation is perfect.  We can predict that Leviathans will become the repository for Romance at Catalyst, now that BattleTech has been updated to match the current zeitgeist.

I’ve been thinking about the Watchmen comic a bit lately.  It too is nostalgic, set a New York City of glass-bottled milk, evening papers, and Zeppelins.  But also futuristic, full of electric cars and geodesic domes–as though it were set in the 1985 imagined in 1960.  The themes are maintained to perfection throughout: imagine how disconcerting it would be to see a Peace Symbol or an McDonald’s or a Walkman anywhere in the frames.  Those are artifacts of our world, and would seem an unnatural intrusion into theirs.

To the degree that the BattleTech setting has ceased to be a future as imagined in the mid-80’s, it has become less Romantic. The cyborgs and germ warfare don’t bother me nearly as much as do the blogs and computer viruses.  It was inevitable that if our favorite pastime were to survive it would change; stasis is death, after all.  But we ought to lament the passing of the old all the same.