Review: Stardust

I have been following Stardust for a long time, ever since Neil Gaiman began posting news from production on his website about a year ago. I never managed to make it to the theater to see the film, but I planned all along to pick it up on DVD. Well, I don’t have a DVD yet, but I’ll certainly be buying a copy soon. Thanks to the new iTunes movie rental service, I watched Stardust last night and it is fantastic.

The plot is simple, but immensely entertaining:
In  Victorian England there is a small village called Wall. Running along the border of the villiage there is a low stone wall, which nobody is ever supposed to cross. One night a young man crosses the wall and finds himself in a magical marketplace, where he spends a single night with a beautiful, lonely slave girl. He returns to Wall and nine months later a son is delivered to him in a basket.

Years later, that son (Tristan) finds himself on the other side of the wall, seeking a fallen star. He has promised his love, a stuck-up town beauty, that he will bring her the star to prove his love. Imagine his surprise when he discovers that the star is nothing less than a beautiful woman names Yvaine, who has been knocked from her heavenly home by a flying ruby, thrown by the dying king of Stormhold.

That ruby sets up a darkly comedic subplot, in which the four (very quickly three) princes of Stormhold search for the ruby and try to kill one another, cheered on the while by the ghosts of the three (four, five…) princes who have already been killed. Because the Yvaine is in possession of the ruby, she (and Tristan) become the object of the murderous princes’ quest.

Added to this already entertaining setup are three withered old hags who hope to attain beauty and immortality by murdering the star and eating her heart. One of them sets out to find and kill Yvaine, while the other two stay at home tearing through the entrails of various animals in hopes of divining clues to the star’s location.

Pursued by three (two, one) murderous princes and a vicious witch, Tristan and Yvaine attempt to make their way back to Wall, where Tristan has promised to help Yvaine get back to the sky after she helps him win the heart of his love. Of course, they begin to fall in love along the way, as Tristan realizes how vain his girl back in Wall is, and Yvaine begins to admire Tristan’s selfless devotion. The two of them are helped along their journey by a crew of lightning farmers, who sail through storms in a fantastical airship. I will not spoil the surprise of Captain Shakespeare’s true personality, except to say that Robert Deniro has rarely been so fearsome, nor so kind, in a single brief appearance.

So there you have it: murderous brothers, ruthless witches, boisterous sky sailors, and a young man finding true love with a star. All strung together by witty banter and comedic irony in a steampunk fantasy kingdom. Stardust may not be the deepest of films, but for pure fun and sweet romance, it is one of my favorites of the year.

Brass, Goggles, and the ever essential Aether

Reading and writing about steampunk, I cannot believe that I have not already posted this link. If you are at all interested (even, like me, in a casual way) in steampunk as a genre and artistic style, then you owe it to yourself to bookmark Brass Goggles. I’m sure there are more in-depth (obsessive?) websites out there, but few offer such a regular stream of fantastic clockwork and aetheric costumes, works of art, and inventions.

Enjoy the ticking,
-otto

Mainspring -Jay Lake

Look upon this body as a machine made by the hands of God, which is incomparably better arranged, and adequate to movements more admirable, than is any machine of human invention.
-Descartes

Many people have used the analogy of a clock to describe the universe. For some this is an argument in favor of a loving God, intimately involved in the creation of this complex universe in which we live. For others the clockwork precision of physics argues against any such spiritual elements. In Mainspring, Jay Lake makes the analogy inarguably real and physical. From his first description of the majestic brass curve of earth’s track curving upwards into the morning sky, to the terrible precision of the twenty mile wide gears, milled to incalculable precision by God’s own hand, which grind intractably along their way, bearing the earth along its orbit, there is no doubt that Lake has reinvented our word in a radical way. Even the angel Gabriel is wrought of clockwork metals, from his finely scaled brass limbs to the razor edged feathers of his wings.

Mainspring tells the story of Hethor, to whom the brass angel Gabriel has given the task of saving the world. The mainspring in the heart of the planet is winding down and someone, some human, must find the Key Perilous and journey to the south axis of the world to re-wind the stalling planet. Of course, as a 16 year old apprentice clockmaker, Hethor has no idea how he will reach his destination, let alone find a clockwork-Christian relic that everyone he asks considers to be little more than a legend. Undaunted (and given a jump-start by being kicked out of his master’s house), Hethor sets out on his quest. Along the way he will encounter fantastic creatures, majestic palaces, noble savages, and more than his fair share of treachery.

Setting his story in an alternate history of America (and lands to the south) in 1900, Lake constructes a world where Queen Victoria rules over all of North America by the might of her fleets of majestic airships and through the administration of horology obsessed politicians and clerics. All technology, and even life itself, is ultimately based on clockworks, steam, and “electricks.” Even the wild, unfallen peoples of the south (who have never seen a clock in their lives) speak in a rhythmic language that echoes the ticks, clicks, and whirs of God’s gear-driven earth. The combination of curiously modern, old-fashioned technology and breathless descriptions of wonders is strongly reminiscent of a well translated Jules Verne novel.

Many of the most compelling passages in Mainspring consist of brief descriptions of clockwork-infused technology and history. Cory Doctrow called the book a “thoroughly engaging blasphemy” in his back cover blurb. Blasphemy? I wouldn’t go that far. Certainly the story touches upon the supernatural, and reworks history and Christian teachings to reflect its horological absolute, but there is nothing more blasphemous here than a vague conclusion, which affirms the God’s role in creation while leaving unanswered the question of his continued interest in his cosmic wind-up toys.

That ending, and indeed the concluding four or so chapters of the book, are the only flaws in an otherwise fantastic story. Perhaps I am missing the point, but I was quite disappointed when the story took a turn for the magical. It was not all bad, indeed the final 10 pages more than made up for any flaws in the preceding chapters, but some scenes had me scratching my head in puzzlement. The most notable of these are the re-appearance of the voiceless winged “savages” and the entire visit to the misty city of nightmares (seriously Lake, that felt like a bloodied-up trip to The Island Where Dreams Come True, not a steampunk adventure). And while I think it is sweet and all having Hethor fall in love with a hairy Pygmy woman in an Edenic land (indeed, their love turns out to be key in the conclusion) the page or so of sexual awakening felt perfunctory and did little to advance the story or characters.

Complaints aside, I certainly enjoyed reading Mainspring. Lake has created a truly interesting world, one that blends history, fantasy, and philosophy personified into a single, smoothly ticking literary machine.

Word of the Day: Tetragrammaton

One of the reasons that I like reading so much is that it exposes me to new words. Take, for example, the following word:

Tetragrammaton

I first came across the word when watching the science fiction film Equilibrium, where it referred to some sort of governmental organization. Yeh, whatever.

I came across it again yesterday while reading a steampunk novel, in which it apparently is returned to its proper meaning. The tetragrammaton is a Greek expression for the mystical 4-letter name of God ( יהוה ). Nobody knows exactly how to pronounce the word. Observant Jews make no attempt to speak the sacred name, instead replacing it with phrases (in hebrew) that mean “The Name”, “The Ineffable Name”, “My Lord” etc. Later scholars abandoned this fearful respect and attempted to pronounce it as “Yahweh” or “Jehovah” (arriving at these by plugging in vowel sounds and translating the hebrew into other languages).

Interesting. Now, back to reading this fine novel (review to be posted in a few days).

//Note:
This post has inspired me to create a new section on this site, especially for words. I have quite a collection of words on my home computer and this will give me the opportunity to ponder them, and perhaps get some input on their origins.