George R.R. Martin was born September 20, 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey. His father was Raymond Collins Martin, a longshoreman, and his mother was Margaret Brady Martin. He has two sisters, Darleen Martin Lapinski and Janet Martin Patten.

Martin attended Mary Jane Donohoe School and Marist High School. He began writing very young, selling monster stories to other neighborhood children for pennies, dramatic readings included. Later he became a comic book fan and collector in high school, and began to write fiction for comic fanzines (amateur fan magazines). Martin’s first professional sale was made in 1970 at age 21: “The Hero,” sold to Galaxy, published in February, 1971 issue. Other sales followed.

In 1970 Martin received a B.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, graduating summa cum laude. He went on to complete a M.S. in Journalism in 1971, also from Northwestern.

As a conscientious objector, Martin did alternative service 1972-1974 with VISTA, attached to Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation. He also directed chess tournaments for the Continental Chess Association from 1973-1976, and was a Journalism instructor at Clarke College, Dubuque, Iowa, from 1976-1978. He wrote part-time throughout the 1970s while working as a VISTA Volunteer, chess director, and teacher.

In 1975 he married Gale Burnick. They divorced in 1979, with no children. Martin became a full-time writer in 1979. He was writer-in-residence at Clarke College from 1978-79.

Moving on to Hollywood, Martin signed on as a story editor for Twilight Zone at CBS Television in 1986. In 1987 Martin became an Executive Story Consultant for Beauty and the Beast at CBS. In 1988 he became a Producer for Beauty and the Beast, then in 1989 moved up to Co-Supervising Producer. He was Executive Producer for Doorways, a pilot which he wrote for Columbia Pictures Television, which was filmed during 1992-93.

Martin’s present home is Santa Fe, New Mexico.

By 1977, Martin had already published a number of stories in his Thousand Worlds setting and it made sense that his first full-length novel would also form a part of it. Originally, it was serialised in Analog Science Fiction and Fact between April and July 1977. In the SF Masterworks edition of Dying of the Light, Martin’s friend and collaborator Lisa Tuttle provides a useful introduction which explores its place in his career. She describes the novel as “an apprentice work”, and as the last gasp of the author’s youthful, romantic period. Certainly, there is a pervasive theme of endings and change in this book.

Dying of the Light opens with a lyrical description of the planet Worlorn, which for hundreds of years existed on the edges of human awareness. A rogue planet hurtling through space without a star of its own, it was a useless rock. Only when it came into the orbit of the red star “Fat Satan” and its “hellcrown” of orbiting smaller stars did Worlorn become of real interest. For ten years, it hosted a massive festival organised by representatives from fourteen human worlds. But when the novel begins, the festival is long over, the planet is leaving the stars behind, and it has become a dying world.

The main character is Dirk t’Larien, a resident of the advanced and civilised planet of Avalon. He travels to Worlorn at the behest of an old flame, ecologist Gwen Delvano. Since their time on Avalon, Gwen has become the betheyn or “heldwife” of Jaan Vikary, a member of the ritualised, backwards culture of High Kavalaar. Jaan, in turn, is bound by tradition to another man, Garse Janacek – his blood brother or teyn. These and other complex Kavalar relationships play out against the backdrop of a doomed planet.

Dying of the Light is a rather gloomy, mournful novel. It is the elegy for the planet Worlorn, for the abandoned cities built for the long-ended festival, for the love between Dirk and Gwen, and for the cruel, ossified culture of the Kavalar. All of these disintegrating elements are lit by the receding stars of the hellcrown, which shine more dimly on the planet with each passing day. The story has a fairly tight focus, revolving as it does around four characters closely bound by love, tradition, and obligation. They live a lonely life, surrounded by fourteen abandoned and mostly decaying cities.

Martin spends much of the first half of the novel outlining the unique astronomical conditions of Worlorn, the relationship between Dirk and Gwen, and the intricacies of the Kavalar culture in which women are essentially regarded as property. During this phase, Dirk solidifies his view of the situation, which is strongly challenged by the faster-paced and more engaging events of the second half. This results in a real change in the way both Dirk and the reader views the status quo on Worlorn, which is perhaps the novel’s major strength.

Dying of the Light rarely approaches the excitement and economy of Martin’s short fiction from this era. This first half, certainly, feels overly drawn out. Tuttle is right to identify the book as an “apprentice work”, but it has a uniquely elegiac feel which gives it a distinctive identity both within Martin’s bibliography and in the context of 1970s American SF.

Literature Review

Dying of the Light tells the tale of Dirk t’Larien, who is summoned to Worlorn by his former partner Gwen. Seeking closure since their separation, after which he became a nomadic wanderer among the planets, Dirk comes to Worlorn and finds that Gwen has remarried. Sort of. See, Dying of the Light is fundamentally about one of the fourteen societies to settle on Worlorn, the High Kavalars. The High Kavalars are a militaristic society with similarities to the Dothraki of the Ice and Fire novels, with duels between members routine and commonplace. Each Kavalar male takes a ‘teyn’, a male life partner who is part husband and part brother. There is certainly a pretty clear homoerotic undertone to this relationship, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. A Kavalar can also take a ‘beteyn’, a female who becomes his property. Dirk finds that his beloved Gwen has become ‘beteyn ‘ to Jaan, a moderate Kavalar who treats her as a wife rather than as a favourite slave, and seeks to preserve the spirit of brotherhood and honour of Kavalar society whilst abandoning the less respectable habit of hunting humans like animals and treating all women as property. For this he is hated. Also in the mix is Garse, Jaan’s ‘teyn’ who is much less moderate than his partner. Dirk is thrown into a complex web of love and hatred between the three in their bizarre triad, and also comes into conflict with a group of ‘old fashioned’ Kavalars who do not even believe him to be human.

Worlorn is a world without a sun, ejected from its home system by a supernova millions of years ago and now hurtling out of the Galaxy. For a few years as it passed the colossal red supergiant Fat Satan and is attendant stars Worlon became a Festival Planet, with millions flocking from the outer worlds to spend a decade partying before it passed beyond the edge of the Galaxy. Now the Festival is over, its peoples all but gone, leaving behind a few die-hards determined to stay as long as possible before the planet freezes and becomes cloaked in eternal night.

Dirk t’Larien is summoned to Worlorn by his former lover, Gwen Delvano, for a reason she will not specify. On Worlorn Dirk finds Gwen the lover and bonded partner of Jaantony Riv Wolf high-Ironjade Vikary, a visionary leader from the barbarous world of High Kavalaan, but as he learns more about the Kavalar he becomes convinced that Gwen is trapped in a life she does not want. However, as Worlon passes into the night, greater stakes are raised and Dirk finds himself caught in a desperate struggle for survival.

Dying of the Light is one of these amazing finds.  Published for the first time in 1977 (his very first novel, I believe), it’s a science fiction story set on the rogue planet Worlorn: hurtling through space in its aimless course, for the first time since its creation the planet crosses a region densely packed with suns, and gets a chance for warmth and life, however fleeting.

The 14 existing galactic civilizations declare a Festival on Worlorn, each of them building a city to showcase their culture and its accomplishments: when the story begins, the Festival is long over, the cities mostly abandoned, the planet headed once more into the cold blackness of space.

From Worlorn Dirk t’Larien receives a whisperjewel – a psi-encoded memory storage from his former lover Gwen Delvano. It’s a summons, based on an old promise made when they both had the jewels crafted for them: never reconciled with the end of the relationship, Dirk departs for the rogue planet full of hope and dreams.  Once there, though, Gwen welcomes him with puzzlement, looking distant and ill-at-ease, and soon Dirk discovers she’s bound to another man, Jaan Vikary, a highborn from the aggressive and patriarchal society of High Kavalaan.  Now convinced that the summons was Gwen’s way to forever cut the ties with Dirk, saying a final goodbye, t’Larien slowly learns that Kavalar culture requires a woman to be little more than a chattel, to be shared between her mate and his teyn, a sort of blood brother, a bond that stands as the foundation of all things Kavalar.

The “marriage” is not an easy one, complicated by Jaan’s peculiar customs and his society’s preoccupation with racial purity and mutations, therefore Dirk slowly comes to the conclusion that the whisperjewel represented a mute appeal from Gwen to save her from the unhappy liaison.  The situation becomes more problematic as we learn that other Kavalars on Worlorn practice a form of hunt whose prey are the creatures they deem inferior and non-human, which includes everyone else by their standards, so that Jaan’s attempts at stopping the bloody sport and bringing his planet to a higher galactic standard further inflame the already volatile tempers.

Soon Dirk find himself enmeshed in a political and personal struggle, complicated by his feelings for Gwen and a slowly unfolding web of discoveries that create a fascinating cultural backdrop and change his world-view, leading to a breath-stopping open ending.

The post Write up on George R.R. Martin  Dying of the Light appeared first on DayDreamin’ Comics.

Literature Review

 ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’ can be summarized as follows. In Chicago in the near future, Douglas Quail has a dull job and longs to visit Mars. He knows he probably never will be able to go (such trips are possible, but cost a lot of money). So he writes to a company, Rekal, Inc., which can implant false memories into your brain which convince you that you really have been somewhere you haven’t.

He goes to the headquarters of Rekal, and meets McClane, who explains that his company offers Quail the opportunity to live out two fantasies at once: the dream of going to Mars and Quail’s longing for adventure and to live a more exciting life than the one he actually leads. He can be given an identity as a secret agent who has been sent to Mars on a special mission.

Once these false memories have been implanted, Quail won’t believe they’re false: he’ll have no memory of going to Rekal and will instead be convinced he actually did go to Mars on some sort of important mission. Indeed, McClane tells him that the false memories implanted by Rekal are even better than a literal trip to Mars, since the false memories won’t fade, unlike our memories of real experiences.

The problem is that, when Rekal start to implant Quail’s false memory, they awaken a real memory of a trip to Mars Quail actually took – a trip he has completely forgotten about, since the memory of it was erased so he couldn’t tell anyone about the top-secret business he was on. All that lingered was a longing to visit Mars. But Quail had actually been to Mars and worked as a special agent.

Rekal halt the implant process, refund Quail half his money, and bundle him into a robot cab, which takes him home. When he gets there, his wife tells him she is leaving him because he insists on questioning her about Mars: did he really go there? Then, two agents from Interplan (short for ‘Interplanetary’, presumably) show up in Quail’s conapt and say they will have to kill him because he is remembering stuff he shouldn’t know about.

But they offer him an alternative: to undergo another false memory implant at Rekal, which will overwrite his real memories of Mars and his secret mission. He agrees to this (after all, the alternative isn’t exactly appealing), and Rekal decide to implant a memory based on Quail’s childhood dream of meeting small aliens who had landed on Earth with the intention of invading and colonising the world, but who decide against such a plan when they experience the boy Quail’s kindness towards them.

Douglas Quail is an ordinary office worker with a monotonous life, married to a wife who looks down on him and has only one deep desire: to travel to Mars. It is an unattainable longing due to his financial and employment limitations. Still, it obsesses him to consider an unusual alternative: to go to Rekal Incorporated, a company specializing in implanting artificial memories. Their service includes inserting detailed memories of experiences that clients have never had, making them indistinguishable from reality. Quail decides to undergo the procedure to convince himself that he has been a secret agent on Mars, a life full of adventures that he will never be able to experience.

At Rekal, he is met by McClane, the company’s director, who explains that, in addition to the implanted memories, he will receive physical evidence of his supposed trip: tickets, postcards, souvenirs, and medical certificates. Everything is designed to make him believe that he has fulfilled his dream. However, as the technicians begin to implant the false memory, they discover something unexpected: Quail already has repressed memories of a mission to Mars. Under the effects of the sedative, Quail begins to talk confidently about his real trip and reveals that he has been an undercover agent for Interplan, a secret government agency. His desire to go to Mars is not a fantasy but an echo of repressed memories of his experience.

Alarmed, McClane interrupts the procedure and decides not to continue with the false memory implantation. Quail is woken up and returned home without explanation. From that moment on, he begins to experience a feeling of strangeness. Although, at first, he thinks that the implanted memory has failed, he has started to recover fragments of his true past. At home, he finds a box containing samples of Martian fauna, tangible proof that his trip was real. Confused and frightened, he tries to confront his wife, Kirsten, who denies having any knowledge of the matter. Their already strained relationship deteriorates further, and she decides to leave him.

At that moment, Interplan agents burst into his apartment. They inform him that they have been monitoring his thoughts thanks to a transmitter implanted in his brain and that his recovery of memories compromises highly classified secrets. Having been an operative who eliminated a rebel leader on Mars, his existence poses a risk. His memories were erased after the mission, but now that he has recovered them, the only viable solution seems to be to kill him.

Quail tries to escape and disarm one of the agents in desperation but is eventually captured. To save his life, he proposes that, instead of eliminating him, they erase his memory again and replace it with an even more convincing memory, something so satisfying that it will prevent him from looking for Rekal again. The agents accept the deal and subject him to a psychiatric evaluation to determine his deepest fantasy.

To their surprise, they discover that, in his childhood, Quail fantasized about having saved the Earth from an alien invasion. According to this memory, when he was nine years old, a group of little aliens tried to launch an invasion, but, moved by his kindness, they desisted and promised not to attack as long as he was alive. This memory is so deeply rooted in his subconscious that Interplan’s specialists conclude that it would be the ideal memory to implant in him: a story grandiose enough to satisfy his need to be unique but ridiculous enough that he would never want to verify it.

When McClane and the technicians begin the procedure, the unthinkable happens: Quail, under the effects of the sedative, begins to remember that the fantasy is not fictitious. In reality, when he was a child, he stopped an alien invasion, and the aliens really did promise that they would not attack Earth as long as he was alive. Terrified, the Interplan agents understand that killing him could have catastrophic consequences for the planet.

A defeated McClane puts away the fake objects he had prepared to back up the implanted memory, as he now knows that he will soon receive real proof of the aliens’ gratitude. With this revelation, Quail’s destiny changes. From being a problem to being eliminated, he becomes the most important man on Earth, although he did not even know it until that moment.

Significance of Study

Douglas Quail is the main character in the story and the character around whom the whole plot revolves. At the story’s beginning, he is presented as an ordinary man, a frustrated office worker with a monotonous life, and a wife who looks down on him. His desire to go to Mars seems like a fantasy, a way of escaping his mundane reality. However, as the story progresses, we discover that Quail is not the man he thinks he is. His identity has been manipulated, his memories erased, and beneath his appearance as an ordinary citizen lies a government-trained assassin, an Interplan agent who carried out a secret mission on Mars. His evolution throughout the story is complex: first, he is a frustrated dreamer and then a man in crisis, struggling to decipher who he really is until he finally discovers that his existence is crucial to the planet’s security. His character changes constantly as he recalls fragments of his past, but, in essence, Quail is still a man who longs for an extraordinary life and, therefore, seeks desperate solutions, even negotiating with the authorities to implant a new memory that will provide him with satisfaction.

His wife, Kirsten, represents the gray and dispassionate reality that Quail is trying to leave behind. She is constantly irritable, critical, and skeptical of her husband’s dreams. Her contemptuous attitude towards Quail is fundamental to conveying the dissatisfaction he feels in his daily life. However, as the story progresses, the question arises as to whether Kirsten is just a frustrated wife or is involved in a conspiracy to monitor and control Quail. When he begins to recover his memories, she treats him as if he is delusional, but her reaction seems too immediate, suggesting that she might know more than she is letting on. Just as Quail is beginning to remember the truth, her sudden departure reinforces the idea that she could have been a key player in the cover-up of his past.

McClane is the director of Rekal, Incorporated, and the character sets the plot in motion by offering Quail the possibility of implanting false memories. At first, he presents himself as a businessman confident in his technology, convinced that his procedure is infallible. However, when he discovers that Quail already has real memories hidden beneath his surface memory, his confidence collapses. His role in the story is crucial, as he is the turning point that transforms Quail from a simple client into a national security problem. McClane also embodies the cynicism of Rekal’s business: it promises adventure and excitement, but deep down, it only sells illusions to ordinary people looking to escape their routine lives. When he realizes the danger Quail represents, his attitude changes from enthusiasm to despair, and he finally becomes a mere spectator of events, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the secret he has uncovered.

The Interplan agents embody the darkest side of government and espionage. They are cold and pragmatic characters, ready to eliminate Quail when he becomes a threat. Their presence in the story reinforces the paranoid tone of the story: the government not only erases memories but also mind controls its agents through implanted telepathic devices. Their attitude towards Quail changes as they realize the magnitude of his past: at first, they try to kill him without hesitation, but when they discover his connection to the supposed alien invasion, they are forced to reconsider their strategy. The tension between them and Quail is one of the driving forces of the story, as they represent the impossibility of escaping from a past that has been deliberately hidden.

The Interplan psychiatrist plays a key role in the story’s resolution. His job is to analyze Quail’s deepest desires and find a new memory that can satisfy his longing for greatness. The climax of the story comes when he discovers that Quail’s childhood fantasy—having saved the Earth from an alien invasion—is, in fact, a real memory. Although she has little screen time, she introduces the most shocking revelation of the story and forces both Quail and the Interplan agents to rethink their plans.

Shirley, Rekal’s receptionist, is a secondary character, but her role is significant. Her flirtatious and carefree attitude contrasts with the gravity of the situation in which Quail finds himself. Her presence in the story reinforces the idea that Rekal is a commercial enterprise that is more interested in selling experiences than in the consequences of its technology. However, when Quail returns to claim his money, his nervousness indicates that she has even realized something unusual has happened. Her character adds a tinge of irony to the story, symbolizing the superficiality of an industry that promises extraordinary memories without considering the consequences.

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale is a story that plays with memory and identity. Philip K. Dick immerses us in the story of Douglas Quail, an ordinary man who dreams of an extraordinary life but who discovers that his past has been altered and that he is much more than he imagined. What starts as a visit to a company that implants false memories turns into a spiral of revelations that cast doubt on his own story and how the government manipulates reality. The story poses a fundamental question: what defines us as people? What have we experienced, or what do we believe we have experienced?

The structure of the story is a play on layers of reality. Initially, Quail seems like an ordinary man with an unattainable desire: to travel to Mars. Unable to do so, he buys an implanted souvenir of a fictional adventure on Mars. However, what seemed like a fantasy turns into a terrifying revelation: Quail was a secret agent on Mars at some point in his life. However, the government erased his memories and made him believe he had always been a simple office worker. From that moment on, the story becomes a struggle between truth and illusion, and the question is: to what extent is what we remember real? What would happen if everything we believed about ourselves was someone else’s construction?

The irony of the story is key to understanding its message. Quail, a man who longs to escape his dull existence, discovers that he already had the life he dreamed of, but it has been taken away. However, instead of being satisfied with his true story, he remains dissatisfied because the memory has been erased. Dick shows us here the fragility of memory and how our identity is constructed from what we believe we remember. If Quail had received the implant without problems, he would have been happy with a lie, because not knowing the truth allows an illusion to work. But when he realizes the manipulation, his identity crisis is inevitable.

Another central theme of the story is power and control. Interplan, the government agency that employed Quail, has absolute power over his mind. Not only were false memories implanted, but they could also erase his real past whenever they saw fit. This poses a disturbing dilemma: if the government can modify what we remember, what is left of our identity? In a world where technology allows the manipulation of people’s minds, truth ceases to have value because everything can be rewritten. Quail is the perfect example of how power structures can mold an individual without being aware.

The denouement of the story adds a final layer of irony and surprise. When Interplan agents try to find an alternative memory to implant in Quail, they discover that an even more incredible story already exists in his mind: when he was a child, he stopped an alien invasion, and the aliens promised not to attack Earth as long as he was alive. What seemed like a childhood fantasy turns out to be accurate, which completely transforms the situation. In an unexpected twist, Quail is no longer a problem to be eliminated and becomes the most important man in the world. The story ends on an ambiguous note: did the aliens make that pact, or is it another memory implant? Ultimately, the story leaves us with the same uncertainty as the protagonist: we can never be sure what is real and what is not.

Philip K. Dick’s narrative is direct, but it is loaded with philosophical implications. His narration is agile and full of dialogues that reveal information progressively, keeping the reader in constant doubt and discovery. The story’s pace is fast, like a sequence of chained revelations that make the story increasingly complex. In addition, the tone oscillates between the absurd and the tragic since, despite the incredible nature of the situation, Quail’s fate is disturbing. No matter how often they try to reprogram him, his mind will always look for something more, suggesting that the need to escape reality is essential to human nature.

The post Write up on Dick Phillips  ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’ appeared first on DayDreamin’ Comics.

Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1946, Mark S. Geston began writing science fiction novels as a student in the 1960s. Releasing his first book Lords of the Starship while at Kenyon Collegein 1967, he would go on to write four more novels over the years: Out of the Mouth of the Dragon (1969), The Day Star (1972), The Siege of Wonder (1976), and Mirror to the Sky (1992), as well as several short stories.

Not exactly a household name, as Geston himself admits, he devoted most of his life to working as an attorney in the white-collar world of law, rather than the off-planet world(s) of spaceships and aliens.

Now retired from lawyering, Geston was gracious enough to accept NEEMblog’s invitation for an interview over email. I myself am a fan of his work, and snuck in Out of the Mouth of the Dragon as a non-1970s addendum to my “7 Best 70s Science Fiction Books” article.

Literature Review

Sometime in the distant future society has reverted to an almost perpetual Dark Age after millennia of constant war (at one point with forces nebulously known as The Dark Powers).  The landscape is filled with unusual mutants and the relics of past technologically superior empires and peoples: “For every legend there are ten actual wonders.  The hulks of great ships, aircraft, and machines litter the edges of the World, and not even the legends attempt to understand them” (18).

Large portions of the beginning of the novel attempt to make manifest the extreme state of malaise  — a state of mind where people have completely given up  — afflicting the surviving inhabitants of the world.  Here I did not find Geston altogether successful.  Often he resorts to telling us how society is afflicted rather than showing.  After millennia of a lack of new technology,  absence of new easily maintained centralized empires, and lesser cultural production than what was produced in previous Golden Ages, one would think that people would eventually just make do with what they have.  I’m not sure that they would not endlessly reminisce about some distant past of which they have little to no recollection of.  The past would by mythic era rather than a history one could compare to current society.  I would argue that Geston is thinking like a historian retrospectively looking at an era and ascribing a historian’s conception of so-called dark age to the mental state of the people living in the past.  But this is not in itself a major problem but does make a few early portions feel forced.

There are slightly indications that what we’re reading is a historical text — suggested by the historical fragment that forms the preface and the vast time and sheer quantity of characters the narrative covers.  If this aspect had been played up more — i.e. the book we’re reading is a piece of history — the ascribed malaise would have to be interpreted through the lens of time and authorial bias.  But, such experimental works would come later in the 60s and early 70s.

The main narrative is as follows.  Sir Henry Limpkin is called before General Toriman, an aged veteran of the Caroline Republic, one of the few marginally successful extant states.  Toriman proposes a spectacular stratagem to rile the populace out of their malaise, the construction of a massive seven mile long spaceship.  The catch is simple.  Those behind the project know that the spaceship is not meant to function — rather, electrical power, talent, new technology going into its construction will be diverted back into society.  For the people the Starship Victory will be a manifest sign of better times to come — future settlement on a new paradisal planet.

The Sir Henry Limplin and future generations of Caroline people working on the new spaceship wage war nearby mutants inorder to utilize a massive river, journey to ancient space yards near the coast where all the necessary parts for the spaceship are mysteriously well preserved, and divide society into those that know of the “real” purpose of the project (Technos) and the ignorant populace who believe they will be transported off planet when it’s completed.

Soon rival kingdoms and peoples threaten the vessel.  And an array of mysterious signs indicate another power at work….

Significance of Study

The Lords of the Starship takes place thousands of years in our future and Earth has become a wasteland. Buildings and cities still exist, along with high tech items sitting around, but no one has any idea how to use or fix them, so they have been left to fall to dust. It’s very much a Dying Earth style atmosphere, where science is seen as a sorcery of sorts. People tell tales of ancient civilizations that came to ruin, and names and places you and I would recognize have been so changed over the eons that nothing on the map even looks familiar. Dangerous knowledge is kept locked up in Black Libraries, only to be used by government agencies.  It is a bleak picture, where most of humanity has lost hope, living nihilistic lives, no longer interested in doing anything that helps their society move forward. People feel imprisoned on a planet that fights them every step of the way. The world can not possibly go on like this, so how can people get their hope back? Is it worth it to even try?

One of the first things that happens to get the story going is General Toriman of the Republic of Caroline sharing his plan to save humanity with a government official. The plan is quickly approved and put into action, especially since Toriman has old researches and design plans salvaged from ancient engineers and libraries. The plan involves building a gigantic spaceship, one that can carry humanity to a new home, a planet that isn’t dying. Toriman’s plans give details instructions for everything from engines to wing struts to power output. Industries across the country will work tirelessly towards creating everything needed for the ship, including wiring, huge metal panels, interior workings, and engine parts. Everyone finally has something positive to work for, something to look forward to, something their children will be proud of.

Toriman’s plan? It’s all a ruse. The Ship will never leave the ground, ever. Items constructed and electricity generated for the ship will be sent elsewhere in the country.  By “working towards the Ship”, citizens will really be working towards improving their own home planet. It is a beautiful lie.  A beautiful lie that has them working towards something positive, working towards a world they will actually want their children to inherit.

More impressive than the growing Ship is the growing mythology around it. In “Wag the Dog” fashion, stories are promoted and songs are written, with the propaganda reaching an art form. Humanity’s new planet is even named, as if we already know exactly where it is, what we can farm there, and how long it will take to get there.  Do the people want a new home, or do they simply want something to believe in?

I’m so used to character driven stories that it was at first hard to wrap my brain around the idea that Lords of the Starship does not have a main character, or really in fact, any important characters (ok, there is one important character, but no one really knows who he is). Every few pages the story jumps forward months, years or decades, to show the progress of the Ship being built, and how the government is building the lie around it, and how people involved with the Ship have changed their thinking.   Eventually I realized I shouldn’t be worried about missing a connection to the characters,  because they don’t really matter. The Ship is the main character.  It was very odd to read a book with practically no characterization whatsoever.

The post Write up on Mark S. Geston’s first novel Lords of the Starship  appeared first on DayDreamin’ Comics.

Science fiction and fantasy legend Andre Norton (1912–2005) wrote popular stories over a span of seventy years. Her given name actually was Alice, but as teenage boys were her main readers, she adopted the ambiguous name Andre. “I am very used to being ‘Mr. Norton’ and have stunned radio program directors when acting as guest-interviewee by appearing in skirts.”

Called the “Grande Dame of Science Fiction and Fantasy,” Andre Norton broke ground for women in the genre; she was the first woman to receive Grand Master awards from both the World Science Fiction Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America. Her 1965 novel Year of the Unicorn was the first American fantasy novel with a female chief protagonist.

Generations of readers have grown up voraciously reading Andre Norton’s work. Her novels featured a recurring theme of a journey to find one’s full potential—and that more than anything speaks of her dedication to the new writers in the Writers of the Future Contest. She became a judge in 1988 and served until her death in 2005.

“The privilege and pleasure has been given me to serve as one of the judges for this competition. The many stories of high merit which have been placed in my hands have proven that Mr. Hubbard was emphatically correct in his estimation: that a cadre of leaders-to-be in the field of imaginative writing stands ready, willing and able to deliver its best when given the chance of a lifetime to do so offered by the Contest he established.”  —Andre Norton

Literature Review

The guardian of the orphaned Willadene plans to sell her for a bride price. But the girl cannot abide the smell of the would-be-groom and runs to her friend the herbmistress, begging for aid. The herbmistress protects Willadene and makes the orphan her apprentice. As the herbmistress’s apprentice, Willadene steps into an entirely new world, one that involves her with the affairs of court. Willadene can smell evil and magic. Willadene also enjoys some very special powers that involve her with the spy and numerous perilous encounters with evil in the city of Kronengred in a dukedom far, far away. 

Overall, there’s a theme in each story – of a young woman who inherits or possesses a rare magical skill related to the senses, who sets out to right an imbalance along strongly expressed lines of good and evil. Norton also brings across inventive world building, but it’s not enough for me – across the board I felt there was something off with each story, be it the pacing or the lack of attention to characterisation. Not to mention the clumsy sentence construction. Whether the latter is a product of its time or simply that these stories were never subjected to the tender mercies of both a structural and copy editor’s talents, I don’t know.

In Mirror of Destiny Twilla inherits a magical mirror from her teacher, but before she can establish herself as more than a trainee wise woman, she is whisked off as a prearranged bride for people in a nearby land. By some luck, she ends up in the duke’s household, destined for his son, but the marriage is not to either of their taste, so she makes her escape that leads her to the forest, and the breaking of an ancient curse that binds the fair folk of this world. The biggest issue I had with this story was that the pacing dragged, and I didn’t once feel as if the characters were ever in any real danger that they had to overcome.

The Scent of Magic sees Willadene escape a life of drudgery as a scullery maid to apprentice her to a herbwoman – as Willa has the ability to sniff out magic, which is apparently a rare talent indeed. We also see the point of view of the baron’s daughter, who upon gaining her majority, starts working on gaining power – so that was at least interesting, seeing a woman working on feminine power in a patriarchal society. There’s a larger plot afoot too, once again tied into an ancient evil, and the story heads off into a completely different direction near the end. Of the three novellas, this was the one that I felt was structurally stronger.

After the manifold frustrations of Mirror of Destiny, this sequel is, as the saying goes, a breath of fresh air. It’s the work of a mature and confident author who has mastered her personal formula and still managed to keep it from getting stale.

The third of the magical senses in this series is the sense of smell, and magic here is contained in a full range of scents both good and bad. Our main protagonist is the traditional Norton orphan, in this case a survivor of plague, Willadene, who has a most remarkable nose—it’s very nearly as keen as a hound’s. Willadene has a hard life at the beginning of the novel, indentured to her horrid relative Jacoba, who runs a dirtbag tavern frequented by thieves and scoundrels.

Willadene’s goal in life is to escape the tavern and apprentice with the Herbmistress Halwice, a mysterious, possibly aristocratic woman who has mastered the magic of scent. Many of Willadene’s early adventures are directed toward this end, particularly after Jacoba tries to sell her off to the worst of the scoundrels.

While Willadene is resisting forced marriage and suffering mental and occasional physical abuse, another young woman in the city is undergoing similar experiences. Mahart is the duke’s daughter, and has been kept like a princess in a tower, isolated from the world. Now, as she nears her eighteenth birthday, her father finally brings her out in public and sets her up for a royal marriage.

The ducal family has a complicated history. The plague killed the heroic former duke and his male heirs. His daughter, being female, cannot inherit. Therefore the title has gone to a distant relative, a cranky little mouse of a man who hates ceremony and has little use for his daughter except as a means to gain political advantage.

The former duke’s daughter, Saylana, is not accepting her lot in any tame or peaceful fashion. She intrigues constantly on behalf of herself and her lout of a son. But the current duke is a canny politician, and the duke’s Chancellor is considerably more than that.

Meanwhile, the duke is dealing with an outlaw band that has been raiding merchant caravans, a king with a fairly useless heir but a plethora of younger sons including the warrior Prince Lorien, and various conspiracies inside the city itself. It’s all terribly convoluted, and that’s even before the revelation that evil has laired inside the ducal palace.

Willadene finally succeeds in freeing herself from Jacoba and her nasty plans, but in true Norton fashion, there’s hardly any time to relax and enjoy Halwice’s teaching before she’s thrust into the conflict between the duke and Saylana. The Chancellor has a master spy called the Bat (whom in my head I see more as the Dread Pirate Roberts), who has been spying out all the different plots in the city and beyond. Willadene first encounters him as a near-corpse in Halwice’s shop (seriously: Westley who is only mostly dead), cast under an evil spell along with Halwice. She has to break the spell and help revive Nicolas, who almost immediately gets himself hurt again, this time physically.

As I said, it’s convoluted. Willadene and Halwice spend a great deal of time ducking Saylana’s spies, discovering and navigating secret passages, patching up Nicolas, and fighting off magical attacks on the duke, the Chancellor, and Mahart. Saylana’s awful son lumbers in and out, snarling and sneering and threatening various forms of violence. Saylana herself is more into slinking, though she has an epic sneer of her own. And she’s a master of the evil arts of seduction.

Amid all this, Willadene discovers that her magical talents are exceptional and that she can smell evil wherever it lurks. She can also, in houndlike fashion, track individual humans by scent. And she can use various scents and fragrances to both attack and protect.

While Willadene is discovering her powers, Mahart is coming into her own awareness of who and what she is. She understands that she has a duty to marry advantageously, and she accepts the ways in which she’s expected to make that happen. She has her own lesser gift of scent magic, and she has dreams of an enchanted garden. She even learns to ride a horse in scenes that are pretty accurate in their portrayal of a complete beginner’s introduction to these large and highly mobile animals.

(Though really, all those saddle horns—historic saddles did not have horns. That’s a development of the American West, for roping cattle. It’s the handle you snub the rope around. Medieval saddles rose high fore and aft, the better to keep the rider in place, but nobody was roping cattle, especially not noble ladies riding in processions or being abducted into the wilds by wicked scoundrels. So. No horns. Nope.)

It all comes to a head when Prince Lorien defeats the bandit leader and the duke arranges a victory celebration in which Mahart will do her best to capture a royal husband. Saylana of course is not about to let this happen. She throws herself at Lorien and arranges to have Mahart kidnapped by magic, right out of her bed.

It’s up to Nicolas the master spy and equally master tracker, and Willadene the human scent hound, to track Mahart down. While they rush off down the trail, Lorien arranges a more suitably military rescue. Mahart herself, who has come through her sheltered childhood with a remarkable degree of courage and autonomy, manages to escape her captors and find refuge in an enchanted garden—the same one she’s been dreaming of all her life.

This garden is a sanctuary in the heart of a ruined city once dominated by a wicked sorceress. Here the plot swerves away from political intrigue and personal struggle with an occasional flare of magic, to straight-up magical conflict. Suddenly everybody is talking about this place called Ishbi, Ishbi this, Ishbi that. My editorial hat kept falling off its hook onto my head and making me want to beg the author to introduce this concept earlier, please.

It is pretty decent fantasy good-versus-evil, and there’s setup for it earlier, with Willadene repeatedly stumbling across zones of reeking evil during her many perambulations of the back ways of the city and the palace. Saylana has bound herself to the ancient and undead sorceress, who is looking to come back into the world. It’s up to Willadene and Mahart and their respective young men to make sure this doesn’t happen.

The magical plot eventually ties back into the political plot, somewhat abruptly as always in Norton novels. The double romances are not as tacked-on as they often are, though the depiction of Mahart and Lorien dancing at the ball isn’t anything like what both of them claim to remember later. Continuity blip there.

Willadene and Nicolas have a genuine if shallow arc, and come to esteem each other as they work together. I do particularly like the way Willadene uses Nicolas’ instruction in trailcraft as she harvests some cress for dinner, and Nicolas says approvingly, “Welcome to the trail.” That’s kind of romantic.

What’s interesting to me is that the characters are not all cardboard cutouts. The villains tend to be, especially the loutish males with their thick lips (bit of ingrained racism there) and Saylana with her dragon-lady looks (there too). But the Chancellor has a degree of moral ambiguity to him, and the duke is rather lovely in his utter mundanity. He even starts to care about his daughter, once he’s taken the time to notice her.

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Holmes laughed. “Watson insists that I am the dramatist in real life,” said he. “Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-stated performance.”

The last Sherlock Holmes novel (as opposed to short stories) that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote was The Valley of Fear, which was serialized in the Strand Magazine during 1914-1915. Doyle set the story well back in time, before Holmes’ “death” in a fight with Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Doyle places Moriarty in the story’s background, laying some preemptive groundwork for the story, “The Final Problem,” where Moriarty, one must admit, appears a little suddenly for an arch-enemy and nemesis.

In The Valley of Fear, Holmes gets a cipher message from an informant inside Moriarty’s organization, warning him of danger to a man at a country place called Birlstone House. Soon after this, a police detective named MacDonald arrives to ask him to help solve a grisly murder at that very place.

They arrive at Birlstone, which is a stately house surrounded by a moat, whose drawbridge is drawn up every night. So it’s virtually impossible that anyone sneaked into the house during the night. But some time that night, the owner of the house, Douglas, was murdered in his study, his face destroyed by a blast from a double-barrelled shotgun. The circumstances make suicide unlikely, but in that case how did the murderer get away? Holmes, of course, goes over the crime scene carefully with his magnifying glass, and it’s not long before he hits on the solution.

Inspector MacDonald arrives at 221B Baker Street with news that Douglas was murdered the night before. MacDonald, Holmes, and Watson travel to Birlstone House to investigate. After interviewing Cecil Barker, a frequent guest at Birlstone House, and the man who discovered the body, they agree that suicide is out of the question and that someone from outside the house committed the murder. Barker explains that Douglas married after arriving in England five years earlier. Barker believes a secret society of men pursued Douglas, and that he retreated to rural England out of fear for his life. Mrs. Douglas said her husband mentioned something called “The Valley of Fear”. Holmes learns that the housekeeper heard a sound, as if of a door slamming, half an hour before the alarm; Holmes believes that this sound was the fatal shot. Local detective White Mason and Inspector MacDonald track a bicycle found on the grounds of the house to an American staying at a guest house. The American appears to be the murderer, but there is no sign of him. Holmes asks MacDonald to write to Barker, telling him that the police intend to search the moat the next day. That night, they lie in wait outside Birlstone Manor and see Barker fish the clothes of the missing American out of the moat. Barker refuses to explain the situation. At that moment, Douglas appears, alive and well. He hands Watson a written account called “The Valley of Fear”, which explains why he feared for his life. Douglas explains that he had spotted an enemy of his, Ted Baldwin, in the area and expected an attack. When Baldwin attempted to shoot Douglas in his study, Douglas grabbed the gun and, in the struggle, Baldwin was shot in the face. With Barker’s help, Douglas dressed the man in his clothes to confuse his enemies. He then hid himself in the old priest hole at Birlstone. The main narrative pauses to explain Douglas’ past in America. Douglas’ real name was Birdy Edwards and he had been a Pinkerton detective in Chicago. Working for the Pinkertons, Edwards had travelled to Vermissa Valley to infiltrate a corrupt coal miner’s trade union, secretly a cover for a murderous gang. After Edwards brought the gang to justice, the criminals attempted to kill him. Hounded, Douglas ran to England, where he met and married his second wife. Holmes urges Douglas to leave England. Douglas takes this advice, but, shortly after, Holmes learns from Barker that Douglas was lost overboard on the ship to Africa. Holmes believes Moriarty was responsible for ending Douglas’ life and he swears to bring Moriarty down.

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel The Valley of Fear, the crime organization is known as the Eminent Order of Freemen (specifically, Lodge 341), located in the fictional Vermissa Valley.

Significance of Study

The organization is a dark, corrupted version of a fraternal society that operates as a ruthless, mafia-like syndicate. Here is an explanation of how it works, its leadership, and its real-world inspiration.

 The Structure and Operation

While the Eminent Order of Freemen is a legitimate national organization focused on charity and brotherhood, Lodge 341 in Vermissa Valley is entirely corrupt.

• The Facade: They use the language of brotherhood, secret handshakes, and ritual signs to mask their criminal operations.
• The Extortion Racket: The lodge controls the local coal and iron industries through terror. They extort money from wealthy mine owners and managers. If an owner refuses to pay or treat workers the way the lodge demands, they face violent retaliation.
• The “Scowrers”: This is the inner, violent circle of the lodge. They carry out assaults, arson, and assassinations to enforce the lodge’s will and eliminate anyone who speaks out or cooperates with the law.
• The System of Alibis: To avoid police interference, the lodge brings in hitmen from neighboring districts who are unknown to the local authorities. Meanwhile, local lodge members provide ironclad, fabricated alibis for one another.

 The Leadership

The organization is run with an iron fist by Bodie Edwards, known within the lodge as the Bodu-master (or Boss McGinty).

• McGinty is a terrifying, brutal man who holds immense political power in the valley as a local councilman.
• His dual role as a public official and a secret crime boss makes him virtually untouchable by local law enforcement.

 The Downfall

The organization’s stranglehold on the valley is broken by an operative named Jack McMurdo, who quickly rises through the ranks due to his fierce attitude and willingness to commit crimes. However, McMurdo is actually Birdy Edwards, a brilliant undercover detective from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Edwards spends months gathering hard evidence against the lodge, culminating in a mass arrest that sends McGinty and his top lieutenants to the gallows or prison.

 Real-World Inspiration

Arthur Conan Doyle based the Vermissa Valley crime organization entirely on the Molly Maguires, a real-life secret society of Irish immigrants that operated in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania during the 1870s. Just like in the novel, the real Molly Maguires used the framework of a fraternal organization (the Ancient Order of Hibernians) to conduct a campaign of sabotage, extortion, and murder against mine owners, and they were ultimately brought down by a real Pinkerton detective named James McParland.

The Valley of Fear begins with Holmes and Watson investigating the brutal and senseless murder of a country squire, Mr Douglas. The man had an Irish upbringing, but he’d lived for many years in America. Fives years before the murder, Mr Douglas moved to England, married, and settled into a quiet country house called Birlstone Manor.

Mr Douglas was found shot to death in his study by his friend and houseguest Mr Barker. Barker called for help, and Mrs Douglas and the butler came running from their rooms. Barker would not allow the lady to enter and sent the butler for the police. The room was not touched by anyone else. The police sent word to Scotland Yard to send a detective, who asked Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to join the investigation.

When Holmes arrived, he studied the room where the murder took place and questioned the people in the house. Though their stories seemed true and conclusive at the beginning, they were quickly disproved by Holmes. He was not sure at first what the answer to the mystery was, but he could tell at least that Mrs Douglas and Mr Barker were not telling the whole truth. According to Holmes, the case rested on the fact that there was only one dumb-bell in the room where the murder happened. Where was the other?

In part two, Doyle, as Dr Watson, relays events that happened twenty years earlier – events which culminated in the murder at Birlstone Manor. The history follows a young man named Jack McMurdo who takes up residence in a coal mining town in Vermissa Valley. He joins the lodge in town and soon finds out that the members of the lodge are a hardened criminal gang who extend their hand of judgment and revenge on the people in the valley. The lodge would blackmail the local people and require coal companies to pay them large sums of money to keep them from destroying mines. Any time the law would come after them for a crime, the members of the lodge would band together to provide alibis and to intimidate judges and juries.

McMurdo proved himself to be as black-hearted as the rest of the gang, but he also fell in love with a lady named Ettie. He assured her that he would never hurt her or her family. There was no way McMurdo and Ettie could continue to live in that Valley of Fear, so he promised her that they would leave the valley before a year was over. Leaving the valley and the lodge could be dangerous, as the lodge would see it as desertion, so McMurdo told Ettie to be ready to drop everything and leave with him as soon as he gave the signal.

Soon, the lodge was disturbed by news that a Pinkerton detective was coming to the Valley to shut them down. They plotted to kill him, and McMurdo offered his rooms as the place where they could do it. Fortunately, the Pinkerton detective got away before he was harmed, but not before several of the lodge were arrested on charges that they could not fight in court. The detective travelled from Chicago to California, changed his name, married his sweetheart, but no matter where he was, he was never safe. The leaders of the lodge had sworn to have revenge on him. When his wife died, he left America for good. Changing his name to Douglas, he sailed across the ocean to England and then took up residence in Birlstone Manor.

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Sophocles’ life encompassed almost the entirety of the fifth century BCE. Born ca. 495 BCE into a wealthy Athenian family, the young Sophocles was chosen because of his beauty to lead the singing and dancing at the ceremony held in celebration of the Persians’ defeat in the Second Persian War. The same good fortune followed him into adulthood where, if classical Athens ever had one, he was the perennial “golden boy.” For instance, as a young playwright, he defeated the veteran Aeschylus in dramatic competition—the evidence for this is found both on the Parian Marble and in later histories—and from there he went on to win an unprecedented number of playwriting victories at the City Dionysia, all this in spite of suffering from microphobia—that is, having a weak voice—which forced him at an early age to retire from acting in his own plays.

Later in life, Sophocles also served his city as soldier and statesman, appointed as General (strategos) at least twice and Imperial Treasurer of Athens in 443 BCE. In addition to that, he played an important role in religion. As priest of Asclepius (the god of health), he received this deity’s holy snake when it was first brought to Athens and had no temple as yet to house it. Because his counsel was widely respected, the aged Sophocles was one of the probouloi (“counselors”; singular proboulos) chosen to advise the Athenians after their navy was destroyed in Sicily in 413 BCE. Artist, accountant, priest and pretty boy, he was everything to everyone.

He died in 406 BCE at an extremely advanced age, having managed to remain active in theatre right up to the end. Following his death, the Athenians awarded Sophocles the highest honor a mortal could receive: he was dubbed a hero and given the name Dexion (“The Receiver”) for having taken in Asclepius’ sacred serpent. Living then from the triumph of the Persian Wars through almost the entirety of the fifth century BCE, Sophocles’ timely death spared him the horrors of witnessing the final humiliation of Athens at the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War which ended the Classical Age. Truly a blessed and remarkable man, he was the paragon of his times, having served in his day as the ancient Athenian equivalent of Shakespeare, Picasso, Lincoln, and Miss America.

Literature Review

Oedipus the King. After 429 B.C. City Dionysia.

Prologue, 1-150. (Priest, Oedipus, Creon)

The priests of Thebes appear before Oedipus as suppliants, entreating him to find some end to the plague. Oedipus has already sent Creon to Delphi, who arrives to report that the killer of Laius must be sought out and banished. Oedipus vows to find the killer and summons the people of the city.

Parodos , 151-215.

The Chorus of Theban citizens offer prayers to Zeus, Apollo,

Athena for release from the plague.

First Episode , 216-462.

Oedipus appeals for information and pronounces his curse on the murderer. Teiresias is summoned: at first he refuses to tell what he knows, but aroused by Oedipus’ taunts he declares Oedipus the murderer.

Oedipus declares a conspiracy by Creon. Teiresias declares that the murderer is present, and will be found son and husband to his mother.

First Stasimon , 463-512.

The Chorus are fearful of the pronouncement of the seer, but declare their loyalty to their king.

Second Episode , 513-862. (Creon, Oedipus, Chorus; Jocasta)

Creon is indignant at Oedipus’ accusations. They argue over the charge. Jocasta tries to intervene.

Kommos , 649-697. The Chorus advise restraint and Oedipus lets Creon go, though he declares him an enemy. Oedipus tells Jocasta the source of the dispute. Jocasta tells the story of Laius’ death, and Oedipus recognizes many details: but he was a lone killer, whereas a band of killers was reported.

Oedipus worries about the oracle; Jocasta denounces its veracity, adducing the prophesy about her son.

Second Stasimon , 863-910. (Chorus)

Ode to the sanctity of divine law. The tyrant who ignores justice and reverence for the gods will fall. The oracles must be true.

Third Episode , 911-1085. (Jocasta, Messenger, Chorus; Oedipus)

A messenger arrives from Corinth announcing the death of Polybus and Oedipus’ ascension. He allays Oedipus’ fear of the oracle (that he will marry his mother) by telling him of his true birth. Over Jocasta’s objections Oedipus vows to continue his search for the truth. Jocasta runs into the palace.

Third Stasimon , 1086-1109. (Chorus)

Ode to Mt. Cithaeron: we will soon know the parentage of Oedipus.

Fourth Episode , 1110-1185. (Oedipus, Shepherd, Chorus)

The shepherd arrives who exposed the infant of Laius and escaped when Laius was killed. Oedipus’ parentage becomes clear. Oedipus rushes into the palace.

Fourth Stasimon , 1186-1222. (Chorus)

No man is blest: happiness is but an illusion, for even the great power and blessings of Oedipus have come to a fall.

Exodos , 1223-1530. (Messenger, Chorus; Oedipus, Creon)

A messenger announces the suicide of Jocasta and the self-inflicted blinding of Oedipus. Oedipus appears to lament his fate. Creon appears. Oedipus begs him to take care of his children; Antigone and Ismene (mute) arrive to comfort their father. Creon persuades Oedipus to return to the palace, and assumes the kingship.

Oedipus Rex begins with King Oedipus already married to Queen Jocasta, with whom he has four children. The audience learns that Oedipus became the king of Thebes after solving the Sphinx’s riddle, thereby freeing the city from its curse and being rewarded with marriage to the queen. The play opens with a priest and the Chorus asking King Oedipus to help them with a plague that is destroying the city. Oedipus sends his brother-in-law, Creon, to consult with the oracle. Creon returns with the news that the plague will only end when the murderer of the former king, Laius, is found and brought to justice. Oedipus vows to find the former king’s murderer, to avenge him, and bring an end to the plague. 

As Oedipus investigates, the truth begins to emerge. The audience learns that years ago, Queen Jocasta and King Laius received a prophecy that their son would kill his father and marry his mother. Therefore, they sent their son to the mountainside with a Theban shepherd to be killed. However, the shepherd instead gave the baby away to a Corinth shepherd, who in turn gave the baby to the king and queen of Corinth to raise as their own.  

Oedipus summons a blind prophet, Teiresias, who claims to know the answers to Oedipus’s questions. Teiresias refuses to speak, but after Oedipus accuses him of being involved, Teiresias tells Oedipus that he is the murderer of Laius. Teiresias leaves Oedipus with the riddle that the murderer of Laius will turn out to be both father and brother to his own children.  Oedipus does not believe him, because he left his parents behind in Corinth in order to escape the prophecy. He accuses Teiresias of working with Creon to conspire against him. Jocasta tells Oedipus not to worry; she and her dead husband, Laius, received a prophecy that Laius would be killed by his own son, but it did not come true, because Laius had been killed by bandits at the crossroads of Delphi. Oedipus gives pause to this, knowing that he had killed an old man at the crossroads at Delphi in order to save his own life. The shepherd who took Oedipus to Corinth tells him that his father, King Polybus, has died. Oedipus believes that because he is not did not kill King Polybus, he has thwarted the prophecy. 

However, the Corinth shepherd shares that King and Queen Polybus were not Oedipus’s biological parents. Jocasta, realizing the truth, urges Oedipus not to pursue the matter any further. However, Oedipus will stop at nothing to learn the truth. He summons the Theban shepherd who took Jocasta’s baby to the mountain. The Theban shepherd reveals that Oedipus was that same baby, and Oedipus has therefore fulfilled the prophecy by killing his biological father Laius, and marrying his biological mother, Jocasta. 

Jocasta has already figured out the truth and has hung herself. Oedipus then gouges out his eyes with Jocasta’s brooch. Oedipus, after requesting to see his children, is led out of the land of Thebes and his brother-in-law Creon assumes power and control.

When we discuss OT (Oedipus Tyrannus, also known as Oedipus Rex), we often focus on the contemporary political crisis in Athens, the plague that has beset the people, the loss of religious focus that some fear has brought the wrath of the gods upon them – all the ways that we think the play might have affected the contemporary audience.

Significance of the Study

But what we often ignore is the mythic dimension of the play, a dimension that allows us to understand some of the basic tensions of the play. Oedipus comes onto the scene in Thebes after killing the sphinx, a mythical creature with very specific and foreboding connotations from Greek mythology. The sphinx, like many of the other fantastic hybrid creatures, stands as a pre-eminent threat to Greek society and human culture. As a liminal (threshhold) creature, neither one thing nor the other (as a centaur is neither horse nor man, an Amazon neither woman nor warrior, a Siren neither woman nor bird), it threatens our conception of what belongs and what doesn’t, of what can be understood and what cannot, of what can be controlled and what cannot.

The sphinx has an additional threatening feature in that it is its intellect that is so overwhelming. It is a typical motif of Greek myths that mythic heroes fight such creatures, which represent metaphoric threats against human culture and Greek society in particular. It is no coincidence that monumental sculpture describing victories over such creatures is found on the temples of archaic and classical Greece (e.g., Lapiths v Centaurs on the Parthenon, the Temple of Zeus at Olympia; the Greeks v the Amazons on the Parthenon and others; Theseus v Minotaur on the Hephaesteum…). All are the victory of man’s culture over nature gone wild.

The sphinx, too, is such a liminal creature. She has the haunches of a lion, the wings of a great bird, and horribly, the face and breast of a woman. She is treacherous and merciless: those who cannot answer her riddle suffer a fate typical in such mythological stories: they are gobbled up whole and raw, eaten by this ravenous monster. What greater threat is there to a humanity desperate to leave its mark upon history than to be completely consumed and obliterated? Odysseus fights his man-eater (several, actually) and Heracles has his Cacus – mythic heroes often defeat anthropophagy to ensure human and cultural survival (this is typical of mythic heroes in general: many Japanese heroic tales depict heroes defeating man-eating monsters, and even the dragon that St. George kills is so threatening because it is a man-eater). IH students will naturally think of Soumaoro here, too, from the West African epic Sundiata.

This is what Oedipus saves the people of Thebes from when he kills the sphinx, certainly a threat in the mythic sense. Oedipus crows about his ability to save Thebes. He proves Protagoras’ maxim that “man is the measure of all things.” Indeed, “Man” is the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle! But not just any man – Oedipus solves the riddle, Oedipus ends the sphinx’s reign of terror over the people of Thebes, Oedipus brings a new era of harmony to the city of Thebes by besting this mythic and metaphorical threat to human culture and society.

But ironically (and necessarily), this man who overcomes the great threat to human culture posed by the sphinx is the same man responsible for causing an even more serious pollution and rending of the social fabric: this same man commits the cardinal sins of patricide/regicide and incest – the one is disallowed by ancient and modern law because of its threat to society (see Aeschylus’ Oresteia), the other is a mythic taboo first – mythic heroes are supposed to eradicate such threats, not cause them (I am reminded of Claude Levi-Strauss’ conclusion that cannibalism and incest are two sides of the same coin, being the most exaggerated forms of sex and eating).

So the fact that in OT Oedipus begins with a rep for killing a man-eater and ends with the discovery that he has committed incest (mythically equivalent crimes) is the key, I think. Both the response and the responder to the riddle of the Sphinx is Man and Man turns out to be both the preserver and the polluter of the society. Perhaps this is Sophocles’ message to his fifth century audience after all – that man has the power to both preserve and destroy. In order to make the right decision, he must go about his business with both eyes open.

Oedipus Himself:

• What is wrong with Oedipus? Does he have a character flaw?

Oedipus is rather impressive as a leader. He wants to take everything on himself. When it’s suggested he send for a prophet, he’s already done it, for example. Ironically, he doesn’t follow through with how all this applies to him, how he really is responsible for it all. Notice (in most translations) how he uses the personal pronoun “I.” He seems full of himself, but there’s a blind spot in the middle of all this pomposity.

A very telling instance of what’s wrong can be detected in the whole notion of the riddle of the Sphinx. Here’s Joseph Campbell’s discussion of the riddle:

The Sphinx in the Oedipus story is not the Egyptian Sphinx, but a female form with the wings of a bird, the body of an animal, and the breast, neck, and face of a woman. What she represents is the destiny of all life. She has sent a plague over the land, and to life the plague, the hero has to answer the riddle that she presents: “What is it that walks on four legs, then on two legs, and then on three?” The answer is “Man.” The child creeps about on four legs, the adult walks on two, and the aged walk with a cane.

What was the Sphinx?

Did Sophocles during his time served in the Greek army in Persia adapt the Sphinx to Greece?

The riddle of the Sphinx is the image of life itself through time–childhood, maturity, age, and death. When without fear you have faced and accepted the riddle of the Sphinx, death has no further hold on you, and the curse of the Sphinx disappears. The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy.
(The Power of Myth, 151-152)

The Sphinx was a being with the head of a woman, the body of a lioness, the wings of an eagle and the tail of a serpent. She guarded the entrance to the city of Thebes and would pose a riddle to travellers who aimed to enter. If they could not answer it, she would devour them. The riddle is “What goes on fours in the morning, on twos in the afternoon and on threes at night?” When Oedipus travelled to Thebes, the Sphinx posed the riddle to him. He said that the answer is a human being, because a human being walks on all fours in early life, on two legs as an adult and with a walking stick in old age. It would seem that the Sphinx regarded the value of her life as bound up with having a riddle that no mortal could solve, for she killed herself because of his success. Oedipus was then appointed king because of his service to the city. In Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King, Oedipus talks about his achievement. He converses with the blind seer Tieresias, who understands the language of birds and uses this ability to predict the future. Oedipus says: Her riddle was not something the first man to stroll along could solve – a prophet was required. And there the people saw your knowledge was no use – nothing from birds or picked up from the gods. But then I came, Oedipus, who knew nothing. Yet I finished her off, using my wits rather than relying on birds. (2004: 471-478)

Oedipus continued toward Thebes and found the city in crisis. The Sphinx had established herself on the road to Thebes — some sources place her on Mount Phicium, others on the city walls themselves — and was killing every traveler who could not answer her riddle. The city was effectively under siege. Laius had been on his way to Delphi to seek Apollo’s help with the Sphinx when Oedipus killed him at the crossroads. With Laius dead and the Sphinx unchallenged, Thebes was leaderless and desperate. Creon, Jocasta’s brother, had assumed temporary authority and proclaimed that whoever freed the city from the Sphinx would receive the throne and Jocasta’s hand.

The Sphinx’s origin varies across sources. Hesiod’s Theogony makes her the offspring of Echidna — the mother of monsters — and possibly Orthrus (the two-headed dog) or Typhon. Other traditions attribute her to Hera, sent as punishment on Thebes for Laius’s crime of abducting Chrysippus, the son of Pelops. In this version, the Sphinx is a divine punishment — the city pays for its king’s transgression, and the creature’s removal requires a reckoning with the city’s buried guilt.

Oedipus approached the Sphinx. She posed her riddle. The most common version, recorded by Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 3.5.8), runs: “What has one voice but walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?” Athenaeus (Deipnosophistae 10.456b) preserves a longer, metrically structured version attributed to the epic poem Oedipodeia (now lost): “There is a thing on earth that is two-footed, four-footed, and three-footed, and has one name; and of all creatures that move upon earth and through the air and in the sea, it alone changes its nature. When it moves supported on the most legs, then the swiftness of its limbs is weakest.”

Oedipus answered: “Man.” The human being crawls on all fours as an infant, walks upright on two legs in the prime of life, and uses a cane as a third leg in old age. The answer is correct. Some sources record a second riddle: “There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other, and she in turn gives birth to the first.” The answer is day and night (in Greek, both hemera and nyx are feminine nouns). This second riddle is not attested in the earliest sources but appears in later compilations.

The Sphinx, upon hearing the correct answer, destroyed herself. The manner varies: she threw herself from her rocky perch, or she was pushed, or she was killed by Oedipus. The self-destruction is the most common version and carries its own significance — the Sphinx does not lose a fight; she ceases to exist once her riddle is solved. Her power was the riddle. Without it, she is nothing.

Thebes erupted in celebration. Oedipus was crowned king and married Jocasta. They had four children: two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, and two daughters, Antigone and Ismene. For years — the traditions vary on how many — Oedipus ruled Thebes competently and peacefully. The city prospered under the man who had defeated the Sphinx.

Bottom of Form

Every nation has its own mythology. Today, the first mythology that comes to mind is Greek and Roman mythol­ogy. The reason why it is attributed to Greece and Rome is that these surviving legends were written in Greek and Latin. However, the origin of these legends is not Greece. It is Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Egypt. In fact, it is a tradi­tion formed by the influence and mixing of oral traditions from different geographies. Today, the fact that European civilizations see themselves as the continuation of Rome and that researchers are predominantly western scientists has caused mythologies to be misinterpreted intentionally or unintentionally. This view has been engraved in people’s minds, especially through cinema and other means of com­munication. The sphinx, which is the subject of the study, is one of these. Although it has a history dating back to the 3rd millennium BC, the first written mention of the creature is Hesiodos (8th century BC), one of the ancient Greek writers. In Greek mythology, the sphinx appears as a winged crea­ture with a human, usually female, head and a lion’s body. In his Theogonia

1, Hesiodos says that the sphinx settled on a mountain to the west of Thebai, in the immediate vicin­ity of the city, and asked riddles to passers-by, killing those who could not answer, and that this situation continued until Oedipus solved the riddle.

2

He states that the Sphinx committed suicide by throwing himself down from the rocks after Oedipus asked “what is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening” and Oedipus said “this creature is man”.

3

The origin of the name Sphinx is also Greek. Greek writ­ers agree that the name of the sphinx comes from “Phix”, which in turn derives from the name of Mount “Phikon” on which the legendary Sphinx of Thebai lived. Plato says that the name of the sphinx is derived from the folk etymology “Sphingein” “to try to strangle – to kill by strangling”.4 When we look at the depictions of the creature, we see that it first appeared in Egyptian art and was depicted until late periods.5

1 EYUBOGLU/ERHAT 1991, 325–330. The oldest known sphinx is the “Great Sphinx” in Giza6

2 These statements reveal that although he was depicted as a frightening creature in Greek mythology, he was also recognized as a representative of wisdom because of his riddles. (Fig. 1), which is believed to have been built during the reign of Kefren (2520–2494 BC), the IVth pharaoh of the 4th dynasty in Egypt.

The Sphinx is located at the entrance to the Valley Temple, where the pyramid of Kefren is also located. 20 m high and 77.5 m long, carved into a natural rock, some parts of the sphinx, such as the claws, are made of cut stone. The sphinx, one of the most important monuments of antiquity and Egypt, has been damaged by both natural and human fac­tors for five thousand years. It is known from the “Dream Stone” erected between the front paws of the sphinx that it was buried under sand from time to time7

3 CAN 1994, 198; HAMILTON 1996, 194; COTTERELL 1997, 175. due to sand­storms and that the first cleaning works were carried out during the reign of Pharaoh Tuthmosis IV. The sphinx, which has the body of a lion, is depicted with a beardless face and a nemes8

4 DEMISCH 1977, 15. with an uraeus9

5 DESSENNE 1957, 175; TURANI 1997, 43. snake. Since it is known that some pharaohs were depicted without beards, it is not unusual for the sphinx here to be beardless. The question is whether the sphinx represents the pharaoh or the god. From the Old Kingdom onwards, the sphinx appears in the pyramids as a lion-god (rwty). In the Middle Kingdom it is identified as the guardian of the “Fortress of Sesotris”. In the New Kingdom, he is combined with the god Atum.10

6 PERROT/CHIPIEZ 1882, 243–244, Fig. 157; BONNET 1952, 747; PRITCHARD 1969, 339, Fig. 238 LLOYD/MULLER/MARTIN 1975, 93–94, Fig. 163–166; DEMISCH 1977, 18, Abb. 21; COTTEREL 1997, 50; SCHULZ/ SEIDEL 1998, 75, Fig. 60–61; SILIOTTI 2005, 135, Fig. 134–135. From the reign of Tuthmosis I onwards, the name of the Sphinx of Giza is known as “Hor-em-akhet”. This name means both “Horus on the Horizon” and “Horus in the Tomb”.11

7 The fact that Herodotus does not mention the sphinx is probably due to the fact that the sphinx was buried under the sands at that time. SCHWEITZER 1948, 34. Horus, the sun god, depicted with the head of a hawk and the body of a man, is also known as “Horus Herachte” (the lord of the rising sun in the form of a lion’s head). From the statement in the Book of the Dead12

8 The garment Pharaohs wore on their heads. , “I have passed through the sky, I am Ra, I am the lion”, it is clear that the lion is a manifesta­tion of the sun god.13

9 Pharaonic emblem, the name given to the erec

In Egypt, the pharaohs were the representatives of God on earth, as seen in most of the early societies. A symbol that would perfectly reflect the pharaoh and his divinity was sought and for this purpose, the sphinx was created by com­bining the body of a lion with a human face. With the 4th Dynasty, this wild predatory animal began to be seen as a depiction with the necessary qualities for the pharaoh.14 In fact, in Egyptian mythology, there are gods and goddesses with animal heads and human bodies.15 Anubis with the head of a jackal, Sobek with the head of a crocodile, Horus with the head of a falcon, but this composition, which gives a human face to a god in animal form, emerged for the first time in this period. With the sphinx, a “syncretism” of dei­fied kings and gods depicted in animal form emerged, and in this way, three elements (god-king-lion) combined16 to form the sphinx.17

One may wonder why the body of a lion was preferred to represent the greatest god of Egypt. In Anatolian and Mesopotamian civilizations, the bull or bull’s head is a symbol of the god and bull worship is a cult dating back to Prehistoric times. This can be seen especially in the cult chambers18 (Fig. 2–3) and wall paintings19 at Çatalhöyük, which dates back to the Neolithic period when people settled down. That its sanctity continued in later periods is evident from the bull-horned headdresses worn by gods and god­desses depicted in Anatolian20 (Fig. 4) and Mesopotamian21 (Fig. 5) art, and from their depiction on bulls22

18 MELLAART 2001, 90–99, Şek. 38. . In the Greek and Roman pantheons, the bull also appears constantly. Sometimes in the depictions of Minotauros23

19 HODDER 2006, 191–208. (Fig. 6) or Akhelous24

20 DARGA 1992; AKURGAL 1995; AKURGAL 1998. (Fig. 7), which are formed by combining human and bull bodies, and sometimes in the Cult of Mithras25

21 STROMENGER 1962, Fig. 159. (Fig. 8), one of the mystery religions of Rome, the bull appears as a sacred animal sacrificed to the gods. The bull­fights organized in Spain are in fact nothing but the reflec­tion of these rituals to the present day. Likewise, in religions such as Hinduism, bull worship continues as in ancient times. While the bull was so prominent in cultures outside Egypt, in Egypt it was worshipped, though not as much as the lion. The “Bull of Apis”26

22 EICHLER 1984; SEIDL 1992, 143–158; SEIDL 2004; CAVUSOGLU 2014. (Fig. 9) carrying the sun between its horns is one of them. The Apis Bull, one of the most sacred animals of Egypt, carrying a pair of horns with the sun in the center, became a part of the worship of the goddess Hathor and was accepted as one of the depictions of the goddess.27

23 LIMC 1992, VI–2, 316–325. The main reason why the bull was consid­ered so sacred in Egyptian religion, but could not replace the lion, must be related to its geography. The heads of animals such as bulls, jackals, crocodiles, rams, etc. attached to the human bodies of Egyptian gods belong to the animals most commonly encountered in the Nile Delta. The lion is one of them. However, as is the case today, it has surpassed them all as a symbol of power, strength and dominance. This must be the most logical answer to why the pharaohs adapted their faces to the body of a lion instead of other animals.

In Egyptian art, in addition to representing the pharaoh, sphinxes were mostly identified28

24 LIMC 1981, I- 2, 20–33. with the function of pro­tection (guardianship) and in this context, they were placed at the entrances of temples or sacred places, as in the Giza Sphinx. Although an altar found between the claws of the Sphinx of Giza reveals that it was used as an element of wor­ship in some periods, the places where they were made and the way they were carved reveal that their protective-guard features were at the forefront rather than their worship function.

When we come to the Middle Kingdom Period, we see some changes in the depictions of sphinxes. In this period, sphinxes have lion manes and Osiris beards.29

25 ULANSEY 1989, 12, Fig. 1.3; LIMC 1992, VI–2, Fig. 168, 325–368. The most com­mon sphinxes of this period, the “Tanis Sphinxes”, have the face of the pharaoh, but unlike the Giza Sphinx, they empha­sized the animal side of the sphinx rather than the humanoid side of the sphinx and depicted it with lion ears and mane30

26 LURKER 2005, 29. (Fig. 10) Although this type of sphinx is the hallmark of this period, the usual nemesed sphinxes of the Old Kingdom are also found.31

27 YAVI/YAVI 1996, 100–101; LURKER 2005, 42 This can be seen in the sphinx statue32

28 BONNET 1952, 747; DESSENNE 1957, 176; LISE 1986, 4. of Sesostris III, one of the kings of the 12th dynasty (Fig. 11). The sphinx with an imposing lion’s body, a nemesis with an uraeus serpent and Osiris beard continues the tradition of the Old Kingdom Period.

At the end of the Middle Kingdom Period, after the 12th dynasty disappeared for unknown reasons, the country entered an interim period of depression. Hyksos of Asian origin conquer Lower Egypt.33

29 Osiris Beard: A false beard traditionally worn on the chin by male and During this period, sphinxes continue to be made with new features.34 Differently, the Hyksos depict the sphinx in the winged form borrowed from Syrian art and introduce this type to Egypt.35 The addition of a wing to the lion’s body is not very unusual. For the wing is a symbol of divinity in Antiquity. Winged demons36 (Fig. 12), griffin-demons37 (Fig. 13), chimaira38 (Fig. 14), griffin

39 (Fig. 15), pegasus40 (Fig. 16), lamassu41 (Fig. 17), winged goats (Fig. 18) and many other creatures are depicted with wings. In general, many creatures positioned between gods and humans are depicted with wings. The wing is actually a tool used to reach the gods who are believed to live in the sky. In this context, the addition of a pair of wings to humans, animals or creatures formed by combining the limbs of more than one creature is nothing more than an attempt to transform it into a divine or sacred being. In Christian ico­nography, the depiction of angels with wings in holy places such as churches is a reflection of this understanding. The question to be asked here is why the first Egyptian sphinxes do not have wing attachments as seen on other mixed crea­tures

42 in Asia Minor civilizations. The answer to this ques­tion is related to the function of the sphinx in other civiliza­tions. Because in Anatolian and Mesopotamian civilizations, sphinxes were mostly used as gate guards and were in a posi­tion between gods and humans and did not represent any god or king. Like other creatures, it is a divine creature and has a wing to reach the gods. In Egypt, the sphinx has the body of a lion, the symbol of the god, and the face of the pha­raoh. Since the pharaoh declared himself a god, the sphinx is not an intermediary, but the deified pharaoh himself. The

At the end of the Middle Kingdom Period, after the 12th dynasty disappeared for unknown reasons, the country entered an interim period of depression. Hyksos of Asian origin conquer Lower Egypt.

33 During this period, sphinxes continue to be made with new features.

34 Differently, the Hyksos depict the sphinx in the winged form borrowed from Syrian art and introduce this type to Egypt.

35 The addition of a wing to the lion’s body is not very unusual. For the wing is a symbol of divinity in Antiquity. Winged demons

36 (Fig. 12), griffin-demons37 (Fig. 13), chimaera

38 (Fig. 14), griffin39 (Fig. 15), Pegasus

40 (Fig. 16), lamassu

41 (Fig. 17), winged goats (Fig. 18) and many other creatures are depicted with wings. In general, many creatures positioned between gods and humans are depicted with wings. The wing is actually a tool used to reach the gods who are believed to live in the sky. In this context, the addition of a pair of wings to humans, animals or creatures formed by combining the limbs of more than one creature is nothing more than an attempt to transform it into a divine or sacred being. In Christian ico­nography, the depiction of angels with wings in holy places such as churches is a reflection of this understanding. The question to be asked here is why the first Egyptian sphinxes do not have wing attachments as seen on other mixed crea­tures

42 in Asia Minor civilizations. The answer to this ques­tion is related to the function of the sphinx in other civiliza­tions. Because in Anatolian and Mesopotamian civilizations, sphinxes were mostly used as gate guards and were in a posi­tion between gods and humans and did not represent any god or king. Like other creatures, it is a divine creature and has a wing to reach the gods. In Egypt, the sphinx has the body of a lion, the symbol of the god, and the face of the pha­raoh. Since the pharaoh declared himself a god, the sphinx is not an intermediary, but the deified pharaoh himself.

The first sphinxes could have a human head (androsphinx), but sometimes had a ram’s head (criosphinx) or a falcon’s (hieracosphinx). They often wore a nemes, the striped head-cloth worn by pharaohs. As a protective animal, the sphinx was often sculpted into a throne, or on the armrests.
In Ancient Egypt, the Sphinx was foremost a guardian. It marked the entrances to royal residences and especially to tombs, like the famous Sphinx of Giza, constructed during the 4th Dynasty. An emblem of wisdom and strength, he became known as Her-em-akhet (“Horus on the horizon”), the horizon being the Giza plateau, and Horus being the Egyptian falcon god. A cult was established for the Giza Sphinx, and a small temple was built between its paws. During the Middle Empire, sphinxes were often in pairs, and starting at the time of the New Empire, there were avenues flanked with long rows of sphinxes leading to a temple

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Macbeth, set primarily in Scotland, mixes witchcraft, prophecy, and murder. Three “Weïrd Sisters” appear to Macbeth and his comrade Banquo after a battle and prophesy that Macbeth will be king and that the descendants of Banquo will also reign. When Macbeth arrives at his castle, he and Lady Macbeth plot to assassinate King Duncan, soon to be their guest, so that Macbeth can become king.

After Macbeth murders Duncan, the king’s two sons flee, and Macbeth is crowned. Fearing that Banquo’s descendants will, according to the Weïrd Sisters’ predictions, take over the kingdom, Macbeth has Banquo killed. At a royal banquet that evening, Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost appear covered in blood. Macbeth determines to consult the Weïrd Sisters again. They comfort him with ambiguous promises.

Another nobleman, Macduff, rides to England to join Duncan’s older son, Malcolm. Macbeth has Macduff’s wife and children murdered. Malcolm and Macduff lead an army against Macbeth, as Lady Macbeth goes mad and commits suicide.

Macbeth confronts Malcolm’s army, trusting in the Weïrd Sisters’ comforting promises. He learns that the promises are tricks, but continues to fight. Macduff kills Macbeth and Malcolm becomes Scotland’s king.

Macbeth Summary

Three witches tell the Scottish general Macbeth that he will be King of Scotland. Encouraged by his wife, Macbeth kills the king, becomes the new king, and kills more people out of paranoia. Civil war erupts to overthrow Macbeth, resulting in more death.

Act I

On a bleak Scottish moorland, Macbeth and Banquo, two of King Duncan’s generals, discover three strange women (witches). The witches prophesy that Macbeth will be promoted twice: to Thane of Cawdor (a rank of the aristocracy bestowed by grateful kings) and King of Scotland. Banquo’s descendants will be kings, but Banquo isn’t promised any kingdom himself. The generals want to hear more, but the “weird sisters” disappear. 

Soon afterwards, King Duncan names Macbeth Thane of Cawdor as a reward for his success in the recent battles. The promotion seems to support the prophecy. The King then proposes to make a brief visit that night to Macbeth’s castle at Inverness. Lady Macbeth receives news from her husband about the prophecy and his new title. She vows to help him become king by whatever means are necessary (*ominous music*). 

Is this a dagger which I see before me?

Act II

Macbeth returns to his castle, followed almost immediately by King Duncan. The Macbeths plot together to kill Duncan and wait until everyone is asleep. At the appointed time, Lady Macbeth gives the guards drugged wine so Macbeth can enter and kill the King. He regrets this almost immediately, but his wife reassures him. She leaves the bloody daggers by the dead king just before Macduff, a nobleman, arrives. When Macduff discovers the murder, Macbeth kills the drunken guards in a show of rage and retribution. Duncan’s sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, flee, fearing for their own lives; but they are, nevertheless, blamed for the murder. 

Act III

Macbeth becomes King of Scotland but is plagued by feelings of insecurity. He remembers the prophecy that Banquo’s descendants will inherit the throne and arranges for Banquo and his son Fleance to be killed. In the darkness, Banquo is murdered, but his son escapes the assassins. At his state banquet that night, Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo and worries the courtiers with his mad response. Lady Macbeth dismisses the court and unsuccessfully tries to calm her husband. 

Act IV

Macbeth seeks out the witches who say that he will be safe until a local wood, Birnam Wood, marches into battle against him. He also need not fear anyone born of woman (that sounds secure, no loop-holes here). They also prophesy that the Scottish succession will still come from Banquo’s son. Macbeth embarks on a reign of terror, slaughtering many, including Macduff’s family. Macduff had gone to seek Malcolm (one of Duncan’s sons who fled) at the court of the English king. Malcolm is young and unsure of himself, but Macduff, pained with grief, persuades him to lead an army against Macbeth. 

Act V

Macbeth feels safe in his remote castle at Dunsinane until he is told that Birnam Wood is moving towards him. Malcolm’s army is carrying branches from the forest as camouflage for their assault on Macbeth’s stronghold. Meanwhile, an overwrought and conscience-ridden Lady Macbeth walks in her sleep and tells her secrets to her doctor. She commits suicide. As the final battle commences, Macbeth hears of Lady Macbeth’s suicide and mourns. 

Significance of the Study

Chapter 1

The Three Witches—often referred to as the Weird Sisters—are the supernatural forces driving Macbeth, acting as both prophetic figures and symbols of moral chaos. They appear at the play’s start, accompanied by thunder and lightning, instantly creating a sense of disorder and inversion with their line, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” Their presence is far from superficial; each prophecy they utter pushes the plot ahead.

In Act I, they greet Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and the future “king hereafter,” while telling Banquo that he will sire a line of kings. These statements spark ambition in Macbeth. By Act III, they serve Hecate, their supernatural leader, who criticizes them for acting without her approval. In Act IV, they summon three apparitions that instill false confidence in Macbeth: warning him about Macduff, assuring him that no man “of woman born” can hurt him, and promising safety until Birnam Wood moves to Dunsinane. While each prophecy is technically correct, they are also intentionally misleading, making the Witches creators of dramatic irony.

Their key characteristics include ambiguity (their gender confuses Banquo), enigmatic speech, and a pleasure in equivocation. They don’t compel Macbeth to act; instead, they tap into desires that are already simmering within him, raising the play’s core question of free will versus fate. Their disappearing acts (they “melt… into the air”) emphasize their elusive, uncontrollable essence. Ultimately, they serve as a reflection of human corruption: they expose what characters truly desire and observe the ensuing chaos.

1.2 Who is The Three Witches?

The Three Witches—the Weird Sisters—are the play’s most visually and philosophically disruptive presences. They open Macbeth in Act I, Scene 1 amid thunder and lightning, establishing from the first breath of the drama that the natural order is fractured. Their collective identity is deliberately unstable: Banquo notes in Act I, Scene 3 that they “look not like th’ inhabitants o’ the earth” and that they seem to have beards, yet appear to be women. This gendered ambiguity is a structural feature of their characterisation—they exist outside every boundary Shakespeare’s audience would recognise, occupying a space between human and inhuman, prophecy and manipulation, truth and deceit. Their chanted motto, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” functions as both their philosophy and a warning to the audience: nothing in this play can be taken at face value. Their mode of speech—riddling, rhyming, syntactically inverted—mirrors the moral inversion they embody. They do not lie outright; they equivocate, and that distinction is everything.

1.3 What is The Three Witches’s arc and motivation?

The Witches do not undergo a conventional dramatic arc, and that absence is meaningful. Where every other character is transformed by the events of the play, the Witches remain constant—unchanging observers and orchestrators of chaos. Their motivation, insofar as one can be identified, appears to be the exposure and amplification of human corruption rather than the creation of it. In Act I they seek out Macbeth specifically, suggesting they already know what appetites he harbours. By Act III, Hecate rebukes them for operating independently and asserts control over their next intervention, reframing their purpose explicitly: they will “draw him on to his confusion” by encouraging his overconfidence. The Act IV apparitions—the armed head, the bloody child, the crowned child with a tree—represent the Witches at their most artful, offering truths so carefully packaged in half-context that Macbeth hears only reassurance. Their arc, then, is less a journey than a sustained demonstration: they set the mechanism running in Act I and fine-tune it in Act IV, watching as Macbeth dismantles himself.

1.4 What are The Three Witches’s key moments?

The foundational moment is the triple greeting in Act I, Scene 3: “All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter.” The prophecy does not create Macbeth’s ambition, but it names it, and naming it gives it permission. The aside Macbeth delivers immediately afterwards—”why do I yield to that suggestion / Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair?”—confirms that the Witches have struck something already present in him. Their simultaneous prophecy to Banquo, that he will be “lesser than Macbeth, and greater,” plants the secondary seed of paranoia that will eventually drive Macbeth to order Banquo’s murder in Act III. In Act IV, Scene 1, the cauldron scene with its incantation “Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble” is arguably the play’s most theatrically concentrated piece of atmosphere, and the three apparitions it produces represent the Witches’ most sophisticated piece of equivocation—each statement technically accurate, each one catastrophically misread by Macbeth. The parade of eight kings that follows, with Banquo’s ghost smiling in the glass, is the Witches’ cruelest visual joke: showing Macbeth precisely the dynastic future he has committed murder to prevent.

1.5 What are The Three Witches’s most important relationships?

Macbeth is the Witches’ primary subject, and the relationship is parasitic rather than causal. They feed on his existing desires, never commanding action. Every catastrophe he enacts—Duncan’s murder, Banquo’s assassination, the slaughter of Macduff’s family—is a decision he reaches without their direct instruction. This is the play’s most challenging philosophical proposition: the Witches are implicated in everything and technically responsible for nothing.

Banquo represents the road not taken. He hears identical prophecies and responds with immediate suspicion, warning in Act I that “the instruments of darkness tell us truths… to betray us in deepest consequence.” His resistance to the Witches’ influence makes his murder more tragic and their power more legible by contrast.

Hecate introduces a hierarchical structure to the supernatural world in Act III, Scene 5, rebuking the Witches for their unsanctioned interference. Her intervention clarifies that what follows in Act IV is not random mischief but coordinated strategy: the false security offered to Macbeth is a deliberate trap.

Macduff is the answer the Witches bury inside their most reassuring prophecy. The warning to “beware Macduff” is technically given, then immediately neutralised by the promise that no man “of woman born” shall harm Macbeth. When Macduff reveals he was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped,” the Witches’ equivocation is fully exposed—they told the truth in every word and deceived in every implication.

Chapter 2

Lady Macbeth is even more ambitious and ruthless than her husband. As soon as an opportunity to gain power presents itself, she has a plan in mind. She uses her influence to persuade Macbeth that they are taking the right course of action and even takes part in the crime herself.

For a while she is able to suppress her actions but eventually she becomes unable to deal with the guilt of what she has done. She becomes unable to sleep, and mentally unstable, eventually dying in tragic circumstances.

Macbeth‘s wife is one of the most powerful female characters in literature. Unlike her husband, she lacks all humanity, as we see well in her opening scene, where she calls upon the “Spirits that tend on mortal thoughts” to deprive her of her feminine instinct to care. Her burning ambition to be queen is the single feature that Shakespeare developed far beyond that of her counterpart in the historical story he used as his source. Lady Macbeth persistently taunts her husband for his lack of courage, even though we know of his bloody deeds on the battlefield. But in public, she is able to act as the consummate hostess, enticing her victim, the king, into her castle. When she faints immediately after the murder of Duncan, the audience is left wondering whether this, too, is part of her act.

Ultimately, she fails the test of her own hardened ruthlessness. Having upbraided her husband one last time during the banquet (Act III, Scene 4), the pace of events becomes too much even for her: She becomes mentally deranged, a mere shadow of her former commanding self, gibbering in Act V, Scene 1 as she “confesses” her part in the murder. Her death is the event that causes Macbeth to ruminate for one last time on the nature of time and mortality in the speech “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” (Act V, Scene 5).

Lady Macbeth’s character is central to the plot of Macbeth. Without her ambition and manipulation, it is unlikely that Macbeth would have ever become king. Lady Macbeth’s character also raises important questions about gender roles and power dynamics, as she seeks to take on a traditionally masculine role in order to achieve her goals. Lady Macbeth’s guilt and descent into a mental breakdown also adds a layer of complexity to the play, as readers are shown the consequences of ambition and betrayal.

Lady M is often compared to other strong and complex female characters in Shakespeare’s plays, such as Cleopatra from Antony and Cleopatra and Volumnia from Coriolanus. Like Lady Macbeth, these characters are ambitious and powerful, but also suffer from their own flaws and weaknesses. However, Lady Macbeth is unique in her willingness to manipulate and control others in order to achieve her goals, making her one of the most complex and intriguing female characters in all of literature.

2.2 Lady Macbeth’s Soliloquies

Lady Macbeth has several famous soliloquies throughout the play, including her “unsex me” soliloquy in Act 1 and her sleepwalking scene in Act 5. These soliloquies offer a glimpse into Lady Macbeth’s inner thoughts and motivations, revealing her ambition, guilt, and descent into mental instability. Literary analyses of these soliloquies have revealed the complex and multi-faceted nature of Lady Macbeth’s character, as well as the themes of gender roles, power dynamics, and the consequences of ambition.

Lady Macbeth in Act 1, scene 5-7

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty!
Make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it!

In this soliloquy, Lady Macbeth offers herself to be possessed by evil spirits. Why would a person offer themselves to evil spirits? Lady Macbeth wanted Duncan dead – as a King, God protected him, so for Lady Macbeth to penetrate that protection she had to appeal to the dark side to assist her in her plan. When she says to the spirits, “unsex me”, she wanted them to take away from her the fragile heart of a woman and instead give her the ruthlessness that is associated with men. Lady Macbeth’s determination to get rid of Duncan in order for Macbeth to become King became toxic and dangerous.

Lady Macbeth in Act 5, scene 1

There is a spot

Come off you damned spot! Come off, I said! One ring, two rings. Well then, it must be time to do it. Hell is a murky place! Come on, my love, come on! You are a soldier and you’re afraid? Why should we be afraid that someone will find us out when no one can challenge our power? Still, who would have thought old Duncan would bleed so much?

The Thane of Fife also had a wife. What happened to her? What will these hands never be clean? Stop that my love, stop that. You are going to ruin everything by showing so much fear.

I can still smell the blood. All the perfume in Arabia could not stop my hand from smelling.
Oh! Oh! Oh!

Wash your hands and put on your robe, do not look so sick with fear. I will say it again, Banquo is buried in the ground and he is not going to come out of his grave!

Go to bed, go to bed. I can hear knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come hold my hand. We cannot undo what we have done. Go to bed, go to bed, go to bed.
(Modern Translation)

In this soliloquy, the audience and readers can now see how the guilt of killing Duncan and Banquo is haunting Lady Macbeth. Her conscience gets the better of her, she starts hallucinating and she unconsciously reveals everything in her sleep. Her guilty conscience drove her to mental instability because her mind was struggling to come to terms with what her and her husband had done, all in the name of power. Being over ambitious can mentally destabilize a person.

2.3 Character Analysis

Lady Macbeth, with her unwavering ambition, manipulative tactics, and ultimate descent into guilt and madness, stands as a compelling and complex character in Shakespeare’s canon. Her portrayal challenges societal expectations of gender, offering a nuanced exploration of power and its consequences. Lady Macbeth’s legacy endures as a timeless symbol of ambition and the human capacity for both triumph and tragedy. Lady Macbeth`s downfall serves as a cautionary tale, a stark reminder of the consequences that await those who choose to abandon their moral compass in the pursuit of power. Her journey serves as a potent reminder of the fragile balance between ambition and morality. Through her character, Shakespeare invites readers and viewers to ponder on the intricacies of the human psyche and the price one pays for succumbing to unchecked desires.

Some might say Lady Macbeth was not evil, rather, she was a mentally ill someone who was overly ambitious – what do you say?

Lady Macbeth’s fatal flaw

The tragedy of Lady Macbeth lies in the wilful and even naive suppression of her compassionate human nature in playing the role of accomplice to her husband’s ambitions. This leads to an internal conflict, where she is trapped between acknowledging her innate intuition to show compassion and kindness and her willingness to violate her humanity to ensure that her husband gains the throne. Her willingness to deny her femininity and human nature can be described as her fatal flaw.

Just as Lady Macbeth believes that her husband can will himself into doing what needs to be done to gain the throne, she also feels that she can will herself into being unnatural and annihilating her sense of guilt and human compassion. This has already been shown where she boasts about her preparedness to bash in the head of her suckling babe in the name of ambition.

Before that, she delivers a famous aside appealing to demons to steel her for the enterprise of killing Duncan: 

                        The raven himself is hoarse

That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

Under my battlements. Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.

Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between

Th’ effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts

And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark

To cry “Hold, hold!”  (Act 1, Scene 5)

Lady Macbeth, in this speech, equates human compassion and goodness with femininity and weakness, while asking for her feminine nature to be cancelled out. Her language becomes quite vivid in the process. She goes so far as asking to be unsexed and “stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,” an image with grimly violent sexual undertones. 

Lastly, she asks for milk in her breasts to be turned into gall. This is significant because earlier in that same scene, she worries that Macbeth doesn’t have the stomach to kill Duncan, for he is too full of “the milk of human kindness.” Later, as we have already discussed, she resorts to the awful and horror image of bashing in the head of her suckling child. In short, Lady Macbeth is fully committed to the enterprise of dehumanizing herself and her husband. 

The negative references to babies and motherhood belong to a broader theme or motifs of unnaturalness in Macbeth. However, Lady Macbeth’s strong sense of conviction hides her own innate sense of morality. While chastising Macbeth for his reluctance and weakness, she ponders out loud at her own reluctance to kill Duncan: 

                    Had he not resembled

My father as he slept, I had done ’t. (Act 2, Scene 2)

The milk of human kindness that she mocks in Macbeth also prevents her from killing an innocent man who resembles her father. We can go so far as to say that the face that Lady Macbeth puts up is nothing but bravado and even hyperbole. She adopts vigorously the role of the attendant wife pushing her husband toward his ambition without considering the consequences of this action. Lady Macbeth’s ambition is not for herself. After the murder of Duncan, we see her slip into the background and watch the once-reluctant Macbeth take on the grim role of evil tyrant with absolute enthusiasm all by himself.

Macbeth, who is a seasoned soldier and who understands the meaning of death and killing, is full of trepidation just before and after the murder of Duncan, while Lady Macbeth makes light of it. He understands that killing his king means sacrificing his soul for ambition. As he says after the murder of Duncan, “To know my deed ’twere best not know myself” (Act 2, Scene 2). 

While Macbeth claims that his guilt and bloody hands will stain the whole sea red, Lady Macbeth, on the other hand, claims, “A little water clears us of this deed” (Act 2, Scene 2). Later, in the play, the humanity that Lady Macbeth attempted so hard to suppress emerges in the form of her sleepwalking, where she confesses to her crime and expresses guilt and remorse. As Macbeth slowly gains his sanity after the murder, Lady Macbeth slowly begins to lose her own. It’s as if Macbeth is able to predict the insanity that he will be punished with for his evil crimes and attempts to outrun it successfully with his intense show of remorse and grief just after murdering Duncan.

Lady Macbeth does the opposite. She resorts to hyperbole and playing the hollow part of a callous man, ignoring any appeal to compassion and pushing down any sense of guilt or humane feelings. The reference to a sleeping Duncan was a hint to her suppressed conscience, which eventually leads to her madness. It can be said that Lady Macbeth had a premonition of  such a thing when she warns Macbeth, “These deeds must not be thought / After these ways; so, it will make us mad.” 

The post Write up on William Shakespeare’s MacBeth appeared first on DayDreamin’ Comics.

Fortran has began around late 1953 and early 1954 as a revolution in “automatic programming” in a day when code was written using mnemonic devices of raw assembly instructions [1]. To most it was believed that the inginuity of humanity was required to create efficient software. But after pulling all-nighters in the Langdon Hotel in spring 1956, John Backus and others managed to produce a working compiler in early 1957. About which John remarked

In spite of its continued development it has the reputation of a dated, obsolete language, used by perhaps only a handful of old developers. And yet Fortran is used extensively in many scientific contexts, in part due to inertia. If very efficient and complex code has solved a problem, why re-implement it again? One example domain is Quantum chemisty and solid state physics, where many CPU and GPU based software is still maintained in Fortran [5]. Another example are the excellent linear algebra routines and interfaces written in Fortran such as BLAS/LAPACK [6, 7] which have been the workhorse of many applications, including especially a lot of machine learning (although now of course new CPU/GPU libraries have been developed).

David’s first job after graduating from Harvard was as an Applied Mathematician in the Computing Laboratory of the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, during 1950–1951. His fellow co-workers included Samuel Conte, Charles Warlick, and Mario Juncosa, among others. During this time, David and Mildred purchased their first new house, and had their first son, William David. At that time, Aberdeen Proving Ground contained one of the largest collections of electronic computers in the U.S. They were employed in the Ballistics Research Laboratory, primarily for the calculation of bombing and firing tables. Some of the computers that were being used at BRL included the ENIAC, which was the first general- purpose electronic computer, the ORDVAC, which was designed by John von Neumann who often visited Aberdeen Proving Ground, the EDVAC, which was a rotating drum computer, and a Bell Laboratory paper tape-driven computer. David Young and Charles Warlick worked on the ORDVAC computer using Richardson’s method on a 21 x 21 grid, which required writing a tricky computer program, at that time, because the machine had a total memory of only 1024 40-bit words with no external memory. 

The University of Texas in Austin wanted to establish a Computation Center. Professor Robert Greenwood, and others from the Department of Mathematics, wrote to David, inviting him to come to Texas. At first, David dismissed the offer, because he considered Texas to be an outback area of the country. Eventually, he decided to go and take a look for himself. He was pleasantly surprised to find that Austin was quite a nice city, with a river, hills, and oak trees, as well as having a good university. Lou Ehrlich followed David from Maryland to California to Texas, and became his first PhD student in 1963. In the summer of 1958, David moved his family to Austin-he would spend the rest of his career there. David and Mildred’s third child, Carolyn Ellen, was born in Austin.

In the Fall of 1958, David brought Bob Gregory to Texas to join him as a member of the mathematics faculty, and to help him set up the Computation Center-which was almost non-existent. David, Bob, and a secretary shared an office next to the computer room. The first computer was an IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine, which was the world’s first mass-produced computer. During the next several years, Young and Gregory purchased new computers, expanded the staff, and designed a new building for the Center, which was built partially underground near the University tower. In 1965, David asked Charles Warlick to move to Austin, and to help him run the expanding operations of the Computation Center.

Under David’s leadership, The University of Texas not only built a new Computation Center building, but also acquired two large supercomputer systems-the CDC 1604 computer in 1960, and the CDC 6600 computer in 1966. Gregory was particularly interested in the CDC computers because of their long 60 bit word length. Based on his reputation, David obtained the first $400,000 grant, from the National Science Foundation, toward the purchase of the CDC 1604 computer, which was one of the first transistorized computers. The CDC 6600 supercomputer, which was one of the largest and fastest computers at that time, was purchased with the help of the first NSF million dollar equipment grant.

Literature Review

The skeleton of the Decwar-playing robots is turning out to have other uses. It’s now also the skeleton of an automated Tape Bridge between the local system and the DEC-10, in action within Project UTEXAS as tape.py in the msc folder.

The tape.py code automatically copies files from the local filesystem into the DEC-10 filesystem. It’s as quick and simple as possible, for doing fast iterations around editing local files using modern tools and then smoothly syncing those edits onto the DEC-10. It’s almost a fully automated filesystem sync between the local system and the DEC-10, and in fact could be made into such by scheduling periodic runs. It runs in the Docker container where the DEC-10 lives. The container is effectively an intermediary environment between the local system and the DEC-10. The local files are available live within the container and tape.py sees and copies them there. To use tape.py, work within a terminal session connected to the container. To schedule periodic runs for example, do that in the container, not in the local system. This is necessary because the tape drive and the mounted tape live in the container as part of the DEC-10, not in the local system. In other words, the hardware is in the container. The tape exists as a .tap file within the container’s environment, and meanwhile the local system is simply a place for using modern tools to edit source code.

Execution begins in the container, where tape.py creates a temporary folder and copies in all necessary files. It then executes back10, named after the DEC-10 backup utility, to convert the temporary folder into a tape image with the TOPS-10 tape format. This step generates a standard tape archive .tap file and verifies its integrity by listing its contents. If tape.py is executed with a –simple argument it terminates here, leaving the tape ready for use, and this is in fact the route taken during startup of the container when the tape is initially mounted on the drive. There is one tape mounted on the drive from container startup onwards. What tape.py can do at any time is replace the contents of the tape. One tape, many writes to it, many restores from it within the DEC-10. This one tape is the bridge between the local filesystem and the DEC-10, and many files can pass over it at various times during its lifetime. More tape drives and tapes are possible. One alone is minimalist simplicity.

When not in –simple mode the code transitions into the restoration phase, utilizing the pexpect library to establish a programmatic telnet connection to the DEC-10. With pexpect, the code sends text and monitors terminal output for expected responses. To the DEC-10 the code is indistinguishable from a human user telnetting in. The code is a robot and the overall setup is a kind of Turing Test. As long as the robot acts like a human, everything is fine. This system was developed from late 2024 for the Decwar-playing robots. The full Decwar robots are more complex, but the essential skeleton was directly adapted into tape.py in roughly an hours work. The robot opens a telnet connection and logs in, then uses the standard TOPS-10 tape utility BACKUP to restore from the tape. The tape.py code here is actually a guide on how to use BACKUP, for whenever a restore needs to be done manually. It then gracefully logs out and closes the telnet connection.

The UT Austin Decwar coders had to use MACRO-10 assembly to invoke specific TOPS-10 Unimplemented User Operations. UUOs acted as traps or interrupts that suspended user-level execution and called the TOPS-10 monitor. The monitor would then assert exclusive access over the magnetic-core memory high segment, queuing any other player-jobs attempting to write to the lists until the holding job issued an unlocking UUO. In other words, in order to use the shared memory linked lists for attack and radio messages, player-jobs had to call TOPS-10 directly via assembly code. This is the root reason that assembly code became essential for Decwar, and code in pure Fortran was simply no longer feasible. It unlocked the full potential of the DEC-10, and at the same time forever bound the code to TOPS-10. 

There was very little separation between the game and the operating system, and little hope of moving the code to even a sibling environment such as the DEC-20 and its TOPS-20 operating system. Even though TOPS-20 ran on the same 36-bit hardware, it was derived from BBN’s TENEX operating system rather than TOPS-10, and it used a completely different system-call architecture known as Jump to SYStem instead of UUOs. While TOPS-20 did include a compatibility emulation library called PA1050 designed to intercept and translate old TOPS-10 UUOs into JSYS calls, this emulator had severe limitations. The PA1050 emulator was completely incapable of translating the direct physical segment locks and atomic inter-job synchronization routines that Decwar used to protect its message queues. Because the emulator relied on virtual memory page-mapping structures rather than static core segment locks, the Decwar binary simply could not run on TOPS-20 without a complete rewrite of its underlying assembly code.

The cancellation of the PDP-10 product line by DEC in 1983, and the demise of DEC itself in 1998, seemed to permanently strand the UT Austin Decwar code on an obsolete architectural island. But in another of its surprising near-death experiences, the UT code has survived and flourished in new forms far tougher and more survivable than before, through the physical and digital preservation efforts led by Obsolescence Guaranteed. The mid 2020s saw a spectacular revitalization of this ecosystem. Rather than treating historical computing as dead artifacts meant only for museums, Obsolescence Guaranteed, an informal group of computer history hobbyists and engineers, has focused on creating computer time capsules. By building affordable, fully functional hardware replicas of the classic DEC lineup, including the PiDP-1, PiDP-8, PiDP-11, and PiDP-10, they allow modern users to directly experience the tactile and interactive realities of the mainframe era.

For Decwar, the PiDP-10 replica is one form of resurrection. The PiDP-10 is a scaled-down, desktop-sized physical reproduction of the original PDP-10 KA10 front panel. It features an active array of 74 functional switches and 124 indicator lamps, driven by modern LEDs, that accurately reflect the machine’s internal state. Inside this console beats a dual-hearted system: a modern Raspberry Pi that runs a physical Linux kernel concurrently with a cycle-accurate PDP-10 emulator based on Bob Supnik and Richard Cornwell’s SIMH engine. Physical switch toggles on the front panel trigger interrupts on the Raspberry Pi, altering register states in the PDP-10, while memory writes are translated in real-time to illuminate the physical LEDs. 

Another more permanent and accessible resurrection is represented by Docker. The UTEXAS DECWAR 2.3 Source Distribution Tape Reconstruction is a digital time capsule containing both the source code and the TOPS-10 environment. Docker excels at creating reproducible, automated build pipelines. A Docker image encapsulates the underlying SIMH emulator, the TOPS-10 operating system, and the SDT virtual tape into a single, isolated package. This guarantees that anyone can instantly spin up the living environment as it existed on the HRC DEC-10 in 1982, without worrying about local hardware dependencies or host operating system characteristics. In fact, running in the Cloud is no different than running on local hardware. The preservation efforts go far beyond running a single standalone mainframe. The ARPANET Reconstruction Project aims to revive the ancestral Internet using Old Bits wherever possible. For UT Austin this would mean containers for the HRC DEC-10, Painter Hall DEC-20, and ARPANET IMP, with various connections through telnet and FTP links. Docker, especially using Docker Compose, is explicitly designed to orchestrate multi-node, networked applications. Instead of a user manually launching and configuring separate environments for mainframes and IMPs, a containerized setup can automatically spin up each historical machine in its own isolated container and seamlessly manage the networking between them. Placing the SIMH PDP-10 engine, historical tape images, and disk images inside a container shields users from the friction of modern software dependencies. They don’t need to compile code or configure environments, but can simply start containers and immediately telnet into an Old Bits environment.

The simulation model can be described in two parts, static and dynamic. At a certain moment in time, all variables in the model have fixed states; under these conditions the model is static. If, however, more than one moment in time is considered, several model states are linked successively so that some of the output variables from one state become input variables to the next state and in this way the model becomes dynamic.

DECWAR is a dynamic (real-time) multiplayer game rather than a static (turn-based) one.

DECWAR is a real time space battle game designed to be played by from 1 to 18 people. The object of the game is to destroy all enemy bases and ships, and capture all enemy planets, before the enemy does the same to you. Each person plays on a separate terminal, and enters the game by typing R GAM:DECWAR Players are free to enter and leave the game as desired, since each has his own job and therefore won’t interfere with the other players (the jobs interact through a shareable high segment). The first person to run the game selects the startup options. The startup options are:

1. Regular or Tournament game. A regular game randomly initializes the galaxy. A tournament game prompts for a startup code. Each tournament game played with the same code has the same initial galaxy setup. Answering with a defaults to a Regular (ie random) game setup.
2.  Include Romulans. Romulans are nasty beasts that beginners are better off without. However, if you’re the only person playing, the Romulan is your only competition. Romulans tend to make for shorter games, and answering with a defaults to include Romulans in the game.

 3. Include black holes. Black holes are annoying, since if you are displaced into one, you’re dead. They also tend to gobble up stray torpedos. Answering with a defaults to NOT include any black holes. There are two primary opposing forces in the galaxy — Humans (Federation) and Klingons (Empire). As you enter the game for the first time, you get to choose which side you’ll join (unless there is a large imbalance in the team sizes). If you are subsequently destroyed and later reenter the game, you automatically rejoin your old team. You get to select the ship you want to control from a list of remaining ships on your side.

 There are 9 ships on each side:

Federation ships Empire ships Excalibur Farragut Intrepid Buzzard Cobra Demon Lexington Nimitz Savannah Trenton Vulcan Yorktown Goblin Hawk Jackal Manta Panther Wolf

Due to continuous espionage activities, present front-line ships of the Federation and the Klingon Empire are identical in strength and weaponry. These ships can move from sector to sector using either warp or impulse engines, can attack enemy installations and ships using either photon torpedoes or phasers, and can defend themselves against such attack using their deflector shields. All ships also possess sub-space radios which keep them in touch with friendly starbases and other ships. The various devices of a ship are subject to damage. This damage may be due to enemy attack or to over use. These damages, unlike total ship damage (see ship attributes below), may be repaired while underway. If damage on a device is less than 300 units, its performance is degraded. If damage is 300 or more units, the device is inoperative. A ship possesses the following devices:

1. Warp Engines — These engines are the normal mode of trave l for starships. The maximum speed is warp factor 6, with warps 5 and 6 risking potential damage to the engines. If warp engines are damaged (less than 300 units) the maximum speed is warp factor

3. 2. Impulse Engines — These engines are basically for emergency use while the warp engines are critically damaged. Impulse engines move the ship at warp factor

 1. 3. Photon Torpedo Tubes — Used to fire photon torpedoes. If these tubes are damaged, the accuracy of torpedo bursts is impaired. The maximum torpedo range is 10 sectors.

• Phaser Banks — Each ship possesses two phaser banks, with a single phaser control. Damage to this phaser control or to the ship’s computer reduces the strength of the phaser hit. 5. Deflector Shields — The deflector shields of a ship protect it from damage from phaser and photon torpedo hits, and shield it from the energy released when a star goes nova. The percent shield strength indicates the percent of the incoming hit which will be nullified. In addition, strong deflector shields may deflect photon torpedoes with little or no damage.

 NOTE: If a ship’s shields are up, the amount of energy expended during movement is doubled.

6. Computer — The ship’s computer is used for computed firing, computation during ship movement, and for phaser control. I f the computer is inoperative, navigation during warp and impulse movement becomes inexact.

7. Life Support — If the life support units of a starship are inoperative, the ship must either repair this damage or dock within 5 stardates. If this is not accomplished, the crew will die.

 8. Sub-Space Radio — The sub-space radio is used to communicate with other ships, of either side. Bases under attack also use the sub-space radio to call for help and notify their team’s ships of their destruction.

 9. Tractor Beam — The ship’s tractor beam is used primarily to tow damaged friendly ships away from danger. The beam can not be used unless both ships have lowered their shields. In addition to the individual devices discussed above, a newly commissioned ship (or a fully repaired and rearmed older ship) possesses the following attributes: 1. 5000 units of ship energy. Ship energy is used during movement and phaser firing. It is also decreased each time the ship gets hit with phasers or photon torpedoes. If this quantity ever reaches zero, the ship is dead. A ship possessing 1000 units of ship energy or less automaticallУ goes to yellow alert, and a warning bell sounds after every move. 2. 2500 units of shield energy.

This energy is stored in the ship’s shields (whether up or down), and is separate from the ship energy. However, energy may be transferred between these two energy reserves as needed. If shields are up, their energy is decreased each time the ship gets hit. 3. Zero units of ship damage. During battle, a ship collects hits from enemy installations and ships. If these accumulated hits ever reach 2500 units of damage or greater, the ship is destroyed. Ship damage may be reduced only by docking. The galaxy is arranged in a grid of 75 by 75 sectors. Players can move freely throughout the galaxy in search of enemies, which come in several categories:

1. Romulan. This can be the most dangerous thing to come up against, and fortunately there is a maximum of 1 Romulan in the game at any given time. The Romulan moves around concealed by his cloaking device until he comes across a suitable target (Federation or Empire ship or base) which he immediately proceeds to attack. An infinite supply of torpedoes and energy make him a formidable foe. If you kill one, another will eventually appear somewhere in the galaху.

 2. 3. Enemy ship. This is the second most dangerous thing to come across, since all enemy ships, are backed by human intelligence. All ships are created equal, and so the outcome of a clash between two ships is usually due to skill on its captain’s part, although some other factors do come into play. Enemy base. These aren’t dangerous unless you come within range 14 sectors) since they are immobile. If you ARE foolish enough to get within range, however, their overwhelming phaser power will quickly pound you into rubble! Destroying a base is useful primarily because this removes it from use by your enemy (bases are used as supply stations and as a refuge in times of stress). A damaged starbase will slowly build itself

stress). A damaged starbase will slowly build itself back to full strength if it is not completely destroyed.

4. Enemy planet. These are just like enemy bases, except that they are weaker (how much weaker depends on how many fortifications the enemy has built on them), and they can be captured. Their firing range is only two sectors, and they can re-supply the enemy less rapidly than can a base.

5. Neutral planet. While these aren’t strictly classified as enemies, they will take pot shots at you (their range is also 2 sectors), so be wary of them. You can capture neutral planets and win them over to your side.

When playing the game, all commands can be abbreviated to 2 characters, and some can be abbreviated to 1 character (you can use the shortest unambiguous abbreviation). For a list of commands typе and HELP * for a description of an individual command tyуpe HELP command The help on individual commands will be read from this help file (that’s what the periods in column 1 are for in the long description of each command). The legal commands are:

1. BASES — List information on friendly and known enemy bases.

 2. BUILD — Develop installations on a planet, and eventually build it into a base. The planet must first be captured.

3. САРTURE — Win a neutral or enemy planet over to your side.

4. DAMAGES — List damaged devices and their current status.

5. DOCK — Dock at an adjacent base or planet. This increases your energy, replenishes your torpedoes, repairs your ship a little, and reduces your ship damage.

6. ENERGY — Transfer energy between two ships.

7. GRIPE — Record bugs, comments, suggestion, etc. in the file GAM:DECWAR.GRP, which is periodically reviewed by the implementors.

8. HELP — List or describe the legal commands•

 9. IMPULSE — Move using impulse engines.

10. LIST — List various information about ships, bases, and planets.

 11. MOVE — Move using warp engines.

12. NEWS — Tell about any new features or enhancements described

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Peer to Peer

Knowledge Based Article on Dungeon & Dragons as a Strategy Game/Simulation Programming

Pool of Radiance is a computer role-playing game developed and published by Strategic Simulations, Inc (SSI) in 1988. It was the first computer adaptation of TSR’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D or D&D) fantasy role-playing game. It is the first in a four-part series of D&D computer adventure games. The other games in the “Gold Box” series used the game engine pioneered in Pool of Radiance, as did later D&D titles such as the Neverwinter Nights online game. Pool of Radiance takes place in the Forgotten Realms setting, with the action centered in and around the city of Phlan.

Just as in traditional D&D games, the player starts by building a party of six characters, deciding race, sex, class and ability scores for each. The player’s party is enlisted to help the city by clearing out the marauding inhabitants which have taken over. The characters move on from one area to another, ultimately confronting the powerful leader of the evil forces. During play the player characters gain experience points, which allow them to increase their capabilities. The game primarily uses a first-person perspective, with the screen divided into sections to display pertinent textual information. During combat sequences, display switches to a top-down perspective.

Generally well received by the gaming press, Pool of Radiance won the Origins Award for “Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Computer Game of 1988”. Some reviewers criticized the game’s similarites to other contemporary games and its slowness in places, but praised the game’s graphics and its role-playing adventure and combat aspects. Also well-regarded was the ability to export player characters from Pool of Radiance to subsequent SSI games in the series.

Pool of Radiance is based on the same game mechanics as the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rule set. As in many role-playing games (RPGs), each player character in Pool of Radiance has a character race and a character class, determined at the start of the game. Six races are offered, including elves and halflings, as well as four classes (fighter, cleric, wizard, and thief). Non-human characters have the option to become multi-classed. During character creation, the computer randomly generates statistics for each character, although the player can alter these attributes. The player also chooses each character’s alignment, or moral philosophy; while the player controls each character’s actions, alignment can affect how NPCs view their actions. The player can also customize each character’s appearance and clothing. Alternatively, the player can load a pre-generated party to be used for introductory play. These characters are combined into a party of six or less, with two slots open for NPCs. Players create their own save-game files, assuring character continuation regardless of events in the game. On an MS-DOS computer, the game can be copied to the hard-disk drive. Other computer systems, such as the Commodore 64, require a separate save-game disk.

The game’s “exploration” mode uses a three-dimensional first-person perspective, with a rectangle in the top left of the screen displaying the party’s current view; the rest of the screen displays text information about the party and the area. During gameplay, the player accesses menus to allow characters to use objects; trade items with other characters; parley with enemies; buy, sell, and pool the characters’ money; cast spells, and learn new magic skills. Players can view characters’ movement from different angles, including an aerial view. The game uses three different versions of each sprite to indicate differences between short-, medium-, and long-range encounters.

In combat mode, the screen changes to a top-down mode, where the player decides what actions the characters will take in each round. These actions are taken immediately, not after all commands have been issued (as is standard in some RPGs). Optionally, the player can let the computer choose character moves for each round. Characters and monsters may make an extra attack on a retreating enemy that moves next to them. If a character’s hit points (HP) fall below zero, he or she must be bandaged by another character or the character will die. The game contains random encounters, and game reviewers for Dragon magazine observed that random encounters seem to follow standard patterns of encounter tables in pen and paper AD&D game manuals. They also observed that the depictions of monsters confronting the party “looked as though they had jumped from the pages of the Monster Manual.”

Different combat options are available to characters based on class. For example, fighters can wield melee or ranged weapons; magic-users can cast spells; thieves have the option to “back-stab” an opponent by strategically positioning themselves. As fighters progress in level, they can attack more than once in a round. Fighters also gain the ability to “sweep” enemies, effectively attacking each nearby low-level creature in the same turn. Magic-users are allowed to memorize and cast a set number of spells each day. Once cast, a spell must be memorized again before reuse. The process requires hours of inactivity for all characters, during which they rest in a camp; this also restores lost hit points to damaged characters.

As characters defeat enemies, they gain experience points (XP). After gaining enough XP, the characters “train up a level” to become more powerful. This training is purchased in special areas within the city walls. In addition to training, mages can learn new spells by transcribing them from scrolls found in the unsettled areas. Defeated enemies in these areas also contain items such as weapons and armor, which characters can sell to city stores.

Pool of Radiance was the first official game based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules. The scenario was created by TSR designers Jim Ward, David Cook, Steve Winter, and Mike Breault, and coded by programmers from Strategic Simulations, Inc’s Special Projects team. The section of the Forgotten Realms world in which Pool of Radiance takes place was intended to be developed only by SSI. The game was created on Apple II and Commodore 64 computers, taking one year with a team of thirty-five people. This game was the first to use the game engine later used in other SSI D&D games known as the “Gold Box” series. The SSI team developing the game was led by Chuck Kroegel. Kroegel stated that the main challenge with the development was interpreting the AD&D rules to an exact format. Developers also worked to balance the graphics with gameplay to provide a faithful AD&D feel, given the restrictions of a home computer. In addition to the core AD&D manuals, the books Unearthed Arcana and Monster Manual II were also used during development. The game was originally programmed by Keith Brors and Brad Myers, and it was developed by George MacDonald. The game’s graphic arts were by Tom Wahl, Fred Butts, Darla Marasco, and Susan Halbleib.

Pool of Radiance was released in June 1988; it was initially available on the Commodore 64, Apple II series and IBM PC compatible computers. A version for the Atari ST was also announced. The Macintosh version was released in 1989. The Macintosh version featured a slightly different interface and was intended to work on black-and-white Macs like the Mac Plus and the Mac Classic. The screen was tiled into separate windows including the game screen, text console, and compass. Graphics were monochrome and the display window was relatively small compared to other versions. The Macintosh version featured sound, but no music. The game’s Amiga version was released two years later. The PC 9800 version 『プール・オブ・レイディアンス』 in Japan was fully translated (like the Japanese Famicom version) and featured full-color graphics. The game was ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System under the title Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Pool of Radiance, released in April 1992.

The original Pool of Radiance game shipped with a 28-page introductory booklet, which describes secrets relating to the game and the concepts behind it. The booklet guides players through the character creation process, explaining how to create a party. The game also included the 38-page Adventurer’s Journal, which provides the game’s background. The booklet features depictions of fliers, maps, and information that characters see in the game. The package also included a translation decoder wheel. After the title screen, a copy protection screen was displayed consisting of two pictures and a line. The player was required to use the decoder wheel to line up the pictures, then enter the word revealed on the decoder wheel. After three unsuccessful attempts, the game automatically shut down.

D&D Meets the Electronic Age

In 1979, Gangbusters creator and Original D&D Discussion contributor Rick Krebs had a D&D campaign called “Realm of the Celestial Wizard” when he wrote the following:

We were one of those fortunate groups to gain the use of a 4K (4,000 bit) memory, BASIC speaking microcomputer. We mentioned to several fellow DMs and gamers of our plans to program it to handle role playing games (D&D, Boot Hill), and to my surprise there was a lot of concern about letting a machine become a part of role playing games.

Quoted from the article “D&D Meets the Electronic Age” in Dragon (Issue 26 – Jun 1979), p. 26.

The purpose of this thread is to discuss the relationship between early D&D and computers. It sometimes seems today’s grognards still don’t like to mix computers and D&D. And I’m not sure why. Not oldschool? D&D’s founding fathers both got into the computer gaming industry—

Dave Arneson: Computer company founder and Professor of computer game design. Quoting from Dave Arneson’s official website: In 1978,

Arneson stepped into the computer industry. He founded 4D Interactive Systems, Inc., a computer company in Minnesota that is still in business today. He also did some programming and worked on several games. He eventually found himself consulting with computer companies.

Living in California in the late 1980s, he had a chance to work with special education children. Upon returning to Minnesota, he pursued teaching and began speaking at schools about educational uses of role-playing. In the 1990s, he began working at Full Sail, a private university that teaches multimedia subjects, and continues there as a professor of computer game design.

According to their projects page, 4D Interactive Systems, Inc. programmed several game titles for Avalon Hill, including Guns of Fort Defiance, Computer Acquire, Computer Stocks & Bonds, and Computer Baseball Strategy.

Gary Gygax: computer RPG game developer. Let me get this out of the way first: Gary Gygax did made some negative comments specifically about online computer games, as quoted in a New York Times article:

“There is no intimacy; it’s not live,” he said of online games. “It’s being translated through a computer, and your imagination is not there the same way it is when you’re actually together with a group of people. It reminds me of one time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said, ‘Because the pictures are so much better.’”

But in a previous interview with Ciro Alessandro Sacco, Gygax expresses love for computer games and has even worked on developing them!

• “I do have several builder/strategy and tactical historical games around that I would love to see as computer ones,…”
• “I’m [in] the process of developing RPG-like games for the computer”—a reference to Lejendary Adventure, which began as a computer roleplaying game and became a tabletop game because of “two botched deals, not [Gary’s] fault”

In Krebs’s article, he finds a balance between the DM’s imagination and the cold mathematical logic of the computer:

An analysis of D&D reveals that movement around a dungeon (which way to go, which door to open, should we fight or run, how do we disarm the trap, etc.) is basic logic (sometimes good logic, sometimes bad) problem solving that can be broken into a mathematical or a computer flow chart. But, the contents of the rooms, how monsters react, what a chamber looks like is an art that a DM develops from experience and use of his/her imagination. So why not let the computer handle the mechanics and the DM handle the material. With the computer doing part of the job it leaves the DM more time to be creative and interact with the players.

So what did Krebs’s computer program, SAGE, do for his campaign? (And Rick: If you’re reading this, can you please talk about SAGE? Do you still have the BASIC source code to SAGE???)

• hit charts and damage allocation
• name generation (for the thousands of minor NPCs)
• creating requisites and levels of non-player characters
• handling the bookkeeping details on player characters
• basic Dungeon that runs itself

Krebs concludes:

the fear that the use of a micro computer will destroy the creativity of role playing games if used in them is groundless. Our experience in recent months has been very positive in SAGE’s use in both D&D and Boot Hill (our program for Gamma World is not finished yet), and if anything, has helped this DM in handling his chores…

The micro computer has its place in role playing gaming as long as its limitations are understood, and the human programmer remembers that his duty is in creativity, while the computer can and should only speed up the mechanics. The computer provides the skeleton for gaming, and the DM still creates the flesh of the campaign.

Oldschool computer games

“The computer in gaming ha[d] been around awhile” when Krebs penned this article for Dragon in 1979. Will Crowther programmed Colossal Cave Adventure for his daughters after playing D&D in 1975. This early computer game would later became the highly successful interactive fiction game, Zork, along with numerous sequels. “Adventure” was originally written in 700 lines of FORTRAN. (The code is archived here.) Here’s a screenshot of the beginning of “Adventure”:



Inspired by “Adventure,” Glenn R. Wichman wrote Rogue in 1980. This was also a dungeon crawl, but it differed from “Adventure” in two main ways. (1) The dungeon was randomly generated on-the-fly, not fixed. (2) A map of the dungeon was written to the screen in ASCII characters—it wasn’t an interactive fiction game. “Rouge” begat many other “Rogue-like” games, like Nethack in 1987, which is still going strong today. “Rogue” was originally written in C on a UNIX machine, but later got ported to PC and Mac in 1984. Here’s a screenshot of the first level of “Rogue” after clearing it of monsters and treasure:



So “Adventure” was FORTRAN and “Rogue” was C. But by the early 1980s, BASIC would become the lingua franca of computer games and game aids, because every brand of personal computer (TRS-80, Commodore, Apple, IBM, …) had a BASIC interpreter. I already mentioned that that Rick Krebs’s program SAGE was written in BASIC.

In 1978, David H. Ahl compiled a book of 101 BASIC computer games. It’s important to note: He didn’t write these games, merely compiled them together in one book. Many of the games are combat simulators. These programs are all available online today on a few sites in several flavors of BASIC: (1), (2), and (3). I seem to remember some of them getting discussed in Dragon, like StarTrek (Issue #38?).

Besides computer game reviews, Dragon published more than a few BASIC programs in the early ’80s, particularly in “The Electric Eye” column by Mark Herro. Here’s an excerpt from the Dragon index on the subject of computers:

Computers:
  ADVENTURE game                  “Electric Eye, The”               Mark Herro        42(42)    Adventure
  As game aid                     “D&D Meets the Electronic Age”    Rick Krebs        26(26)    OD&D
                                  “DM’s Right-Hand Man(?), The”     Roy Earle         36(42)    D&D1
                                  “Dungeon Master’s Familiar”       John Warren       80(17)    D&D1
                                  “Role-Player’s Best Friend, A”    M. D’Alfonsi      158(45)   —
  Avalon Hill games               “AH Meets the Computer”           Tom Wham          41(32)    —
  Basic information about         “Electric Eye, The”               Mark Herro        33(50)    —
  Character creation program      “What Do You Get When You…”     Joseph C. Spann   74(42)    D&D1
  Combat                          “Combat Computer”                 L. & T. Hickman   74(40)    D&D1
  Dice                            “Electric Eye, The”               Mark Herro        45(56)    —
  Dungeon Master utilities        “Electric Eye, The”               Mark Herro        41(44)    D&D1
                                  “Electric Eye, The”               Mark Herro        49(76)    D&D1
  Glossary of terms               “Electric Eye, The”               Mark Herro        39(40)    —
  Home                            “Electric Eye, The”               Mark Herro        46(70)    —
  Online gaming: Getting started  “Online Gaming: Get In the Game!” Michael Blake    312(90)    —
  Programming: BASIC              “Electric Eye, The”               Mark Herro        40(46)    —
  Purchasing                      “Electric Eye, The”               Mark Herro        50(70)    —
  Quiz                            “Electric Eye, The”               Mark Herro        54(74)    —
    Answers                       “Electric Eye, The”               Mark Herro        55(48)    —
  Software                        “Electric Eye, The”               Mark Herro        36(62)    —
  SPACE GAMES-3                   “Electric Eye, The”               Mark Herro        43(70)    —
  Sports games                    “Electric Eye, The”               Mark Herro        47(70)    —
  TRAVELLER use of                “In Defense of Computers”         Paul M. Crabaugh  51(13)    Traveller

Bottom of Form

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Sunny lives in Nigeria, but she was born in New York City. She looks West African, but is so sensitive to the sun (due to her albinism) that she can’t play soccer during the day. She doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere.

Then she learns why.

Her classmate Orlu and his friend Chichi reveal that they have magical abilities- and so does she. Sunny is a “free agents,” overflowing with latent power. And she has a lot of catching up to do.

Orlu and Chichi have been working with their teacher for years. Sunny needs a crash course in magical history, spells, juju, shape-shifting and dimensional travel. Her new world is a secret from her family, but it’s well worth all of the silence, exhaustion and sneaking around.

Still, there is a dark side. After she’s found her footing, Sunny, Orlu, Chichi, and their American friend Sasha are asked by the magical authorities to help track down a criminal. Not just a run-of-the-mill bad guy. A real-life hardcore serial killer-with abilities far stronger than theirs.

A year ago, Sunny Nwazue, an American-born girl Nigerian girl,
was inducted into the secret Leopard Society. As she began to develop
her magical powers, Sunny learned that she had been chosen to lead a
dangerous mission to avert an apocalypse, brought about by the
terrifying masquerade, Ekwensu. Now, stronger, feistier, and a bit
older, Sunny is studying with her mentor Sugar Cream and struggling to
unlock the secrets in her strange Nsibidi book.

Eventually, Sunny knows she must confront her destiny. With the support of herLeopard Society friends, Orlu, Chichi, and Sasha, and of her spirit
face, Anyanwu, she will travel through worlds both visible and invisible
to the mysteries town of Osisi, where she will fight a climactic battle
to save humanity.

From the moment Sunny Nwazue discovered she had mystical energy flowing in her blood, she sought to understand and control her powers. Throughout her adventures in Akata Witch and Akata Warrior, she had to navigate the balance between nearly everything in her life—America and Nigeria, the “normal” world and the one infused with juju, human and spirit, good daughter and powerful Leopard Person.

Now, those hard lessons and abilities are put to the test in a quest so dangerous and fantastical, it would be madness to go…but may destroy the world if she does not. With the help of her friends, Sunny embarks on a mission to find a precious object hidden deep in an otherworldly realm. Defeating the guardians of the prize will take more from Sunny than she has to give, and triumph will mean she will be forever changed.

Akata Witch follows the story of Sunny, a twelve-year-old African-American albino whose family recently moved back to their native Nigeria. Because of her odd looks and African American heritage, Sunny is ostracized by her peers to an extent typical of any book featuring an albino character. Nonetheless, with the help of some friends, Sunny discovers that she is capable of much more than she realized. She is a “leopard person,” a secret race of peoples in Nigerian folklore who walk between the human and spirit worlds and are capable of practicing “juju.” Soon she is whisked into a world of magic, masquerade, and monsters as she slowly assumes her role as a leopard person. Here Okorafor uses her expertise with Nigerian folklore to paint a truly marvelous world outside anything any Western reader could imagine. Each scene brims with foreign words, ideas, and languages in a way that draws the reader into the page.

As I mentioned, albinism is a characteristic most commonly applied to either the weakest or most malevolent characters. Their shocking appearance either provides an air of sickly paleness accompanied by either a physical or emotional weakness, or a frighteningly brutal ghost-like appearance which elicits revulsion from the reader and character alike. Akata Witch is one of the few novels I’ve read that breaks this particular mold. While Sunny’s albinism draws the ridicule of her classmates, Okorafor ensures that Sunny’s character is not tarnished by her physical disabilities or the stigma of her peers. In fact, Sunny’s albinism affects her character in a positive way, as dealing with the physical and social aspects of her albinism help build her confidence. She refuses to allow taunts and abuse to compromise her integrity and is never afraid to defend herself from those who see her as inferior.

Unlike many authors, Okorafor pulled no punches in regards to society’s treatment of those with albinism. As a person of color growing up with albinism, Sunny’s character particularly resonated with me. Her interactions with her classmates and countrymen strongly resembled my own. The odd looks and comments that Sunny deals with from her Nigerian counterparts are familiar to any “albino of color” as we see the confusion in the faces around us—as if we’re pieces in a puzzle that don’t fit correctly. Between the devices we use to protect ourselves from the sun, the blond or white hair, and the pale skin, we’re seen as misfits even among our own societies. Nevertheless, Okorafor does not allow Sunny to succumb to this atmosphere. Unlike most  characters with albinism who are meek, easily manipulated characters, Sunny is an athletic, adventurous, and confident preteen who is not held back by her albinism and is quick to challenge those who question her looks or sun-shield umbrella. In fact, in the Leopard society her condition is seen as an indication of her power and abilities rather than a reason to ostracize her.

However, Sunny’s ready acceptance into Leopard society also plays into the “magical albino” myth that permeates fantasy movies and novels. While Okorafor attempts to distance Sunny’s albinism from the novel’s mysticism, in Leopard society a Leopard person’s abilities are very much influenced by their most striking physical features and/or maladies; the more striking or severe the disability, the more powerful the associated magic. Thus, while in principle Sunny’s albinism is not meant to contribute to the “magical albino” myth, Okorafor’s use of Leopard society ideology and mythology invokes an element of the aforementioned trope which mars what otherwise is an unprecedentedly mundane depiction of albinism.

While Sunny’s character is strongly affected by her albinism, Okorafor ignores or marginalizes some aspects of the condition. Because of our lack of melanin, people with albinism tend to have varying degrees of low vision. But Sunny didn’t suffer from any type of visual impairment; she didn’t even suffer from photophobia, the most common visual impairment associated with albinism. Okorafor’s mysterious “cure” for Sunny’s susceptibility to sunburn was an even more blatant affront to the integrity of her albinism. Soon after Sunny’s magical awakening, she discovers that she is no longer affected by sunlight—that she no longer has to worry about using an umbrella or long clothes to protect herself in the sun. As photophobia (in my opinion) is the most cumbersome physical symptom associated with albinism, Okorafor’s cure does the novel a disservice as she frees Sunny from a burden that every other albino must consciously shoulder or risk the consequences.

From the perspective of its portrayal of albinism I must confess to being underwhelmed by Akata Witch. While I loved Sunny’s character, Okorafor seemed to pick and choose from the physical and social aspects of albinism to craft a character that suited her needs rather than creating a truly realistic character with albinism, and—perhaps unintentionally—strayed back into the “magical albino” trope that mars so many novels with characters with albinism. However, from a literary standpoint Akata Witch is a great novel that features the first strong, sympathetic lead with albinism I’ve seen in quite a few years. With a wonderful setting that provides a breath of fresh air to an otherwise tired premise, accurate, life-like characters, and a great message, 

12-year-old, American born Sunny Nwazue feels out of place in her ancestral home of Nigeria. As an Albino, she is often mocked for her pale skin and yellow hair and struggles to find a place where she belongs. One day, she meets Orlu and Chichi who reveal to her that she is a Leopard Person, a person capable of using juju. Furthermore, Sunny is a free agent, meaning both of her parents are non-magical Lambs. They take her to meet a scholar named Anatov at the center between worlds known as Leopard Knocks and he goes through Sunny’s initiation, revealing her spirit face. Then, he introduces them to an American named Sasha who was sent over after summoning a dangerous masquerade to attack those who were bullying his sisters.

Meanwhile, the mysterious Black Hat is abducting and killing or maiming young children in a type of ritual killing. Sunny works tirelessly to understand her powers, reading from a book called “Fast Facts for Free Agents” and even performing her first juju to sneak out of the house to meet with the others. Anatov sends the group to meet Kehinde in the Night Runner Forest. They are almost killed by bush spirits, but Kehinde praises them for surviving and agrees to mentor Sasha.

Later, the group retrieves study materials and Sasha buys Udide’s Book of Shadows. Then, they meet Taiwo who accepts Orlu as her mentee and informs them that they have formed an Oha coven which bears the responsibility of the world. Furthermore, the Black Hat is a Leopard Person named Otokoto and the group needs to stop him.

A month later, Sunny is taken to Sugar Cream at the Obi Library after she breaks the rules and shows her spirit face to scare her bully. Sugar Cream scolds Sunny and says she will have to ponder whether or not she will mentor Sunny after she made such a foolish choice. Then, Anatov takes the group to Abuja to the Zuma Festival. Sunny is horrified to watch a fight to the death between two Leopard People, including one named Miknikstic who encouraged her. To try and cheer themselves up, Sasha and Sunny join a soccer team and, despite the bullying over her gender, Sunny astounds the players and the crowd with her quick moves and abilities.

Afterward, the group attends a social event where Chichi gets into a juju contest with a rival named Yao. To try and prove herself superior, she summons a masquerade, forcing Orlu to undo it. Then, Sunny learns that the Black Hat stole a special, fourth-floor book from the Obi Library. After a week of torrential rains, the group is summoned in front of the scholars and told that this is their only chance to stop the Black Hat from summoning a powerful masquerade named Ekwensu. Unfortunately, when they arrive at his gas station, the Black Hat has already killed two children and commits suicide to summon Ekwensu. Sunny finds the courage to send the creature away as Orlu revives the children. All four of them are hailed as heroes, though Sugar Cream warns that Ekwensu will return and she will mentor Sunny to prepare them.

However, when Sunny returns home, her father berates her for leaving without telling them anything and says she will not turn out any better than her crazy grandmother, Ozoemena. Once he leaves, her mother explains that Sunny’s grandmother kept many secrets, but she developed a promiscuous reputation even though Sunny’s mother believes Ozoemena was focused on something else. She tells Sunny to be brave and that she trusts her. Then, Sunny reads a letter from Ozoemena who is thrilled about the idea that Sunny may have the same powers as her and apologetic for forcing Sunny into a double life. She warns Sunny that something is coming and she will have to fight. Once the children are returned to their parents, the group transitions into the next phase of their training.

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