Cheese Ends 2026-04-06

I haven’t been doing these for a bit because the news is so depressing.

 

I mean, I tried. I must have gone over sixty or seventy articles. One after another, they ranged from this is interesting technology that can have a profound effect on cancer treatment—oh, yeah. It’s been cut by NIH under direction from the Orange Voldemort. To remember those studies being used to determine how bad the coming catastrophic weather events will be? Gone. (See here, here.)

 

But, hey: writing a blog post is sometimes about sharing experiences. Thus, my pain is now your pain.

 

You’re welcome.

 

As you know, Artemis II is on its way to the moon. As of this moment (Sunday, 4/5/2026), Artemis II is 59,141 miles from the Moon. But let us enter the twenty-first century. That is 95,178 kilometers. Artemis II is supposed to come within about 4000 miles (6537 km) of the surface before it begins to fall back towards Earth. Here’s a very good visualization of the orbits of Apollo 8, Artemis I, and Artemis II.

 

Artemis II launched on 4/1/2026. On 4/3/2026, Orange Voldemort proposed a 23% decrease in its budget. The intention is to shift away from science missions and go to an all Moon/Aal the time NASA.

 

There’s always a lot of talk about how we throw money into space when we should use that money to solve problems at home. I think this is a silly dichotomy. Still, those who think this way might want to question the budgetary priorities since the science aspect, in the form of Earth observation, is astonishingly valuable.

 

Personally, I like all of the science missions. Especially Juno, studying Jupiter. The source of all that amazing material about Jupiter that’s come out in the last few years? Juno. It’s on the chopping block, too.

 

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is the home for climate and weather research. If you’re going to understand weather and climate, you have to study it, right? This means you go where the science leads, rather than where someone’s ideological agenda wants you to go. And the science leads to human-based, fossil fuel-burning climate change. Sorry, folks. That Chinese hoax is so powerful it’s changing the climate. So, if you don’t want climate-driven catastrophic events rammed down your throat without warning, you might want to study them. Right.

 

OV tried to shut it down. And it’s suing about it. Good luck.

 

But the OV likes coal. He wants the plants to stay open even if they aren’t running. Yay. Of course, OV isn’t above paying wind farm developers billions to stop construction and reinvest that money in oil and gas. Exxon thanks you for your support.

 

A little good news. Remember, I talked about the Federal Judicial Center caving to pressure and removing the climate science section from its Reference Manual for Scientific Evidence? Well, the National Academy of Sciences hosts a copy in its library of publications. OV decided that the NAS needed to cave, too, accusing the NAS of hosting a chapter on “climate science that is not based on balanced or sound science.”

 

The NAS said no.

 

Let’s not forget the OV loons that are in charge of health care.

 

We haven’t had a measles problem for years. Until now. While I don’t completely blame the OV for this—there’s enough stupidity going around these days—he’s more in the line as enabler in chief on this one. No more spotty outbreaks for us. No. Now it’s circulating.

 

This is proceeding to the point of absurdity.

 

Each year, we get a crop of interesting science in the form of the Ig Nobel Prizes. Curious research projects that sound ludicrous but actually illuminate a small piece of the natural world. This prize has blessed us with (from the list here) determining if ingestion of alcohol will impair bats’ ability to fly, whether cows painted with zebra striping can avoid being bitten by flies, if ingesting Teflon can successfully increase food volume without increasing calorie content, and for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language.

 

The answers to these questions: it does, they will, it does, and it does.

 

For thirty-five years, this ceremony has been held in Boston. Not so, this year.

 

Many of the participants come from other countries, including those that the OV particularly dislikes. To the point that the organization behind the Ig Nobels has decided they cannot come to this country safely. The ceremony has been moved to Zurich.

 

If you read some of these articles, they’re often from the proposed budget. Congress doesn’t always listen to the OV. Not always. They restored NASA’s budget last year. They may do so again.

 

That said, the OV believes in impoundment, when the executive withholds funding or does not act on a given program that Congress has funded. (See also here.) My understanding of the government was that Congress appropriates the money, which is then spent (under the legislative rules) by the executive. That’s what “power of the purse” means. It’s right there in Article 1, section 7, clause  and Article 1, section 9, clause 7. (See here.)

 

If Congress appropriates money and the executive, on a whim (and it sure does look like these are whims), decides not to spend it, then the “power of the purse” doesn’t mean much.

 

So even if Congress puts back the money, there’s no guarantee that money will be spent where it is supposed to go.

 

All right! All right! Give us a break! Cry out my two, loyal readers.

 

Okay. My heart won’t take any more anyway.

 

The Perseverance rover (remember Perseverance? We dropped it on Mars?) has been scouring Jezero Crater for evidence of life and water. A dried-up lake bed is there. The rover has been investigating the Western Delta that was deposited by a river billions of years ago.

 

Well, its surface radar has found evidence of another, even older river delta underneath the Western Delta. If I were a betting man (Hey. I’m a father. Of course, I’m a betting man.) that’s where I’d look for fossils.

 

Going further with that, we’ve been seeing DNA base pairs in asteroids for years. Sure enough, another such paper was just released. DNA uses guanine, cytosine, adenine, and thymine. RNA replaces thymine with uracil. Every living thing on this planet uses these same nucleic acids. Where did they come from? Did they (literally) drop from the sky?

 

We don’t know where or how life originated on this planet. We just know it had an origin—either colonized from elsewhere or locally grown. It was unclear if the nucleic acids were somehow formed in the reentry or were native to the asteroids. The material returned from Ryugu and Bennu showed that nucleic acids were native to the asteroids examined—though, interestingly enough, not in the same amounts. Bennu had all of them but Ryugu was deficient.

 

This paper shows a thorough investigation of which nucleic acids were found in the sample asteroids with much higher resolution and sensitivity. They found a correlation between the amounts of ammonia present in the asteroid and the concentration of the nucleic acids. (Which suggests to me that the nucleic acids are created on the asteroid in some nitrogen-limited reaction rather than relics of life. Sorry, aliens.)

 

Finally, actual good technological news.

 

We typically run into two types of energy storage devices: batteries, which store chemical energy, and capacitors that store charge. Supercaps—capacitors with great storage capacity—are useful all over the place. Now, supercaps can be made from bourbon.

 

Okay, not quite.

 

Bourbon is distilled from alcoholic mash. That distillate (called charmingly “white dog.”) is aged in charred oak barrels. The material in the char is what gives bourbon its flavor. The bourbon is drained from the barrels and bottled, leaving behind a watery “stillage.” This is a byproduct of the process. Sometimes it’s sold or otherwise discarded.

 

So, Josiel Barrios Cossio of the University of Kentucky thought he might be able to get useful carbon compounds from this remainder. From this, he created a hybrid carbon-lithium-carbon material that stored 25 times the energy/kilogram than normal supercaps.

 

That’s going to have to do you until next time.

 

The Time Machine, Redux

Since the last post (See here.)  one of my two readers took issue when I recommended the new film, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. 

 

I do recommend it highly. I mean, like many SF films, it’s dumb as a stick but it is, as they say, the journey that is important.

 

Okay, okay. It’s not that dumb. 

 

He insisted I explain myself. If I don’t like time travel stories, how could I recommend GLHFDD? 

 

There are a lot of problems with most time travel stories. And, yes, I’m looking right at Star Trek, all iterations. In the original series, time travel was introduced in season 1, episode 24. In The Next Generation, they held off until season 2, episode 13. In Voyager, season 1, episode 4. They started the series Star Trek Enterprise with time travel. In Deep Space Nine, season 1, episode 7. I could go on but I won’t.

 

Let’s think about that. They have the entire galaxy to work with. All these different suns, planets, different species, different biologies, and we have to look for our own past to tell stories? The Expanse didn’t need it. Star Wars didn’t need it. The Alien franchise didn’t need it. 

 

This site claims to have 6,000 time travel movies made since 1896. Given that, is it realistic to go down to that well every time you need inspiration? 

 

I do not say that there are no recent time travel stories that aren’t fun. Time Bandits is one of my personal favorites. I’m just saying that there are a number of SF tropes that have either 1) been done to death or 2) were tired from the beginning. Another similarly tired trope is the Higher Order Being. (That’s right. I’m looking at you, Q.) 

 

A gimmick story works the first time it’s used. That’s why The Time Machine works. It’s because it was the first such idea in use. At least, that’s the idea. However, Wells reused his ideas from an earlier story, The Chronic Argonauts. (The title suggests to me people with chronic stomach distress, but I digress.)

 

After that, there are two ways the gimmick can be used: exploring the ramifications of the gimmick or using the gimmick to tell a story apart from the gimmick. For the first, I suggest Primer and David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself. Both of these explore many of the consequences of time travel. 

 

And, after 6000 tries, I think we’ve exhausted the ramifications of that particular gimmick. Even in just the 21^st century, there have been nearly five hundred films involving time travel. Come on! Given that most time travel stories are about correcting a mistake, (Even Good Luck* falls into this category.) I think we can dispense with most of them. How many times do we have to watch someone go into the past (or an alternate world) to save their nation/save the world/save their wife-brother-mother-son? 

 

It’s like cop shows, doctor/hospital shows, and lawyer shows. After seventy years of television, there’s not much left to mine out of the subjects. 

 

The second use of a gimmick is in service of something else. This is where works like Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die come into play. The time travel is barely on stage. It just hangs there like Checkhov’s gun. It’s important but it’s not the story. Time Bandits uses time travel for an absurdist journey. It’s essentially a way for Terry Gilliam to show us the inside of his mind. 

 

When you lose the gimmick aspect of time travel, interesting things come up. Donnie Darko (2001) is a very interesting film involving time travel and the nature of cause and effect. It’s an example of my point. The film involves time travel but it isn’t about time travel. The day of the time travel gimmick is over. Long live it’s utility in storytelling. 

 

I think the film Predestination (derived from what I think is one of the finest time travel stories ever written: All You Zombies by Robert Heinlein) is very interesting. In this film, time travel is central. But the main story is the arc of the main character. It does explore a gimmicky side of time travel—which the story also does—but it’s one that I don’t think had been done before as a film.

 

I don’t know other genres as well as I know SF so I won’t speak to them. SF has tropes that have also been done to death. At this point stories involving time travel, Higher Order Being, first alien contact, etc., have been done and redone so many times that I’m jaded. I don’t want just another time travel story to save the world. Or a first contact where the alien turns out to be the good guy. Or eats people. Or nearly every Frankenstein story for the last twenty years.

 

This is not to say that there isn’t still meat on those old, old bones. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is pretty fresh. The Expanse had a pretty original take on first contact. I thought both Poor Things and Moore’s Anima Rising were both interesting takes on Bride of Frankenstein. I’m looking forward to seeing The Bride. 

 

Even I’ve written two time travel stories. One published, Another Perfect Day, and one not. (Another Perfect Day is collected here.) APD was, essentially, a story that described the impossibility of time travel. I.e., one could travel in time but only to a time that had no relation to your own. That pesky causality thing. 

 

There’s even time travel regarding Orange Voldemort. 

 

Hm. Time travel to the past to save the world.

 

Okay. Sign me up.

 

 

Consideration of Works Past: The Time Machine, the Movie

When I was a kid, George Pal and Ray Harryhausen were gods.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

Not that I knew who they were. I was, shall we say, less than sensitive to who a given producer or animator was. But I did know Destination Moon, The War of the Worlds, Tom Thumb, and The Time Machine. I knew them by their look and feel. I could tell from a given trailer that this was a film I wanted to see.

 

I only saw Tom Thumb and The Time Machine in the theater. The others came across my TV screen.

 

I was living in Southern California at the time and the TV stations didn’t have five million made for television movies and recycled sitcoms available. Give them time. They would.

 

Instead, they used old SF and fantasy movies in their place. 

 

There were a lot of Creature Features and I saw my share of giant ants, slugs, frogs, and blobs. But it was the SF shows that caught my attention. And I was savvy enough to realize that there were some that were a cut above the rest. I didn’t know George Pal by name but I knew his work.

 

Thus, when I saw a poster for The Time Machine, I got my Dad to take me. 

 

It wasn’t a family affair. My sister was three and, the times being what they were, it was me and my Dad or nothing at all. Mom was staying home with the toddler. I had no control over this. Though, when I had my own toddler, I did take him to see Revenge of the Sith when he was eight. But he didn’t like Obi Wan and Anakin fighting and I took him out. Just as well. That way he didn’t get to see Anakin with his arms and legs burnt off.

 

Ben always preferred “big scary beast.” (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Ray Harryhausen.) We still have the VHS tape but I think it’s worn out.

 

So, I’m *mumble* years old in the theater and I am taken for a ride that I never forgot.

 

A quick synopsis for those who lived under a rock for the last century. No judgement. Some of my best friends are tortoises.

 

The Time Machine was an 1895 novel written by H. G Wells. In it, the nameless protagonist, named only the Time Traveller, invents a device that is able to traverse time similar to traversing any of the other three dimensions. If you can specify movement to a location to a point defined  by x, y, and z, the device allows similar traversal across axis t. It does not traverse any of the other dimensions but remains in the same x, y, and z, place as it moves across t. This is somewhat important to the plot in the novel but is crucial in the film.

 

The Traveller goes to the future, sees how wars continually happen and ends up in what looks like a utopian society where the earth bears fruit without toil and everyone looks healthy and young. These are called the Eloi. After exploring, he returns to the machine and finds it gone.

 

This “utopian” society proves to be supported by underground Morlocks. These live underground and feed and care for the Eloi so they may, in turn, feed on them. The Traveller speculates that the Morlocks were the underclass servants, forced to dwell underground until they became intelligent but animal-like dwellers in darkness. With no challenge to keep them intelligent, the Eloi lost that same intelligence until they were the pretty, child like beings the were the Morlocks’ main course at dinner time.

 

Early on, the Traveller rescues one Eloi, Weena, from drowning and thereafter she clings to him. In the forest at night, they are attacked by the Morlocks and in an accidental forest fire, many of the Morlocks and Weena are killed.

 

The Morlocks try to lure the Traveller into an ambush but he takes the time machine and uses it to escape. 

 

From there, he keeps going to the future, seeing the eventual loss of humanity and the final death of the earth. He returns back to his own period in time to be late to his own dinner party. The frame of the novel is him showing up at said dinner party and telling the story. Subsequently, he departs once more never to be seen again.

 

There’s a lot to like in Wells’ novel but, like many of his works, the characters are sketches and what is important is the ideas.

 

Fast forward to 1960.

 

George Pal had wanted to make this film for years. Pal was originally from Hungary and eastern Europe has been interested in science fiction pretty much from its creation. They always took it seriously while over here in the States, we didn’t think much of it. 

 

I had seen the film again back in the seventies but then didn’t have much opportunity until it showed up on one of the streaming services. 

 

A few things struck me as an adult that didn’t even register when I as a *mumble* year old. 

 

For one thing, the Traveller had a name: George. For another, the bookend nature of the dinner party was more clearly defined. Now, there were two dinner parties: the first, where George shows a model that disappears and then another a week later where George is late to his dinner party, showing up as dirty and bruised. This is in the novel but Pal took time to show a bit of the relationships between him and his friends. In the Wells novel, they’re pretty much scenery that talks—sort of like Socrates’ students, though they didn’t say such things as, “no man of sense could dispute that,” and like epithets. Still, their purpose in the novel is to allow the Traveller to expound on the idea. 

 

Pal’s dinner party is between long time friends. The casting here is great, including the wonderful Alan Young, as Filby, and Sebastian Cabot, as Hillyer. When I was a boy, I didn’t much care who the actors were, just the story. But Alan Young was important to me. Androcles and the Lion was perennially showed on television and I never missed it. One of these days I’ll get a chance to watch it as an adult. 

 

George goes forward through time. Wells guessed at coming wars but Pal had the advantage, in 1960, of knowing about two of them and being frightened of the prospect of a catastrophic third. George stops during World War I, and meets Jaime, Filby’s son, where he finds out his friend had died. He stops during the World War II Blitz, yet another war. He catches the eve of World War III, meeting Jaime a last time, as people are going to the air raid shelter prior to atomic holocaust. He escapes forward in time bit is entombed. He continues to go forward until, over eight hundred thousand years in the future, the rock wears away and he is free.

 

This is where he enters the idyllic future Wells discussed. There are structures that look maintained and several that are ruins. 

 

And it is here in the film I began to get just a little irritated. Not with the film. With the soundtrack. 

 

George is plunging through the jungle of fruits and berries, desperately looking for other human beings. The music is huge, melodramatic, and bombastic—pretty much the prescription for most SF films. (I’m looking at you, Star Trek: The Original Series.) About this point, I figure George must be thinking, I could maybe hear other human beings if someone would turn that damned music off!

 

The music fades, and, sure enough, he hears laughter. This is the scene where he first meets people, Weena falls into the river and almost drowns but George saves her. No one else does anything.

 

From this moment on, George is important to Weena and Weena becomes important to George. In the novel, Weena is almost an encumbrance. Here, there is emotional connection and the beginning of love.

 

Which, evil person that I am, I immediately began thinking: Food and shelter is provided. These are humans. What other thing will they spend their time on? And, being smart, how will the perfect it? I figure George is about to have the time of his life.

 

But they don’t get the chance. The Time Machine has been stolen by Morlocks. The Eloi are entranced by the Morlocks siren (with an allusion that this resembles the air raid siren of WW III) and Weena is captured. George goes to save her. The Morlocks are burned alive and (mostly) destroyed. George gets his time machine back and goes forward too far. Not as far as Wells took him, but enough that he wants to go back to his own time.

 

And he shows up at his dinner party. Recounts the whole tale and is roundly disbelieved.

 

In the book, the only real character in the dinner party is Filby. Like in the book, Filby in the film is the only character that realizes what the Traveller is doing. But, in the film, it is the relationship with Filby that brings George back. And it is the failure of the dinner party that proves to George that this is not, in fact, his time. His time is with Weena. And so he leaves.

 

The film has not degraded since 1960. I think it’s because Pal raised up the character of Weena and the dinner party guests to be more rounded and interesting than they were in Wells’ book. A film recounting just what happened in Wells’ novel would vibrate between boring exposition and themes that we’ve now seen hundreds of times.

 

Now, it turns out, Pal wanted to show that final scene where George goes to the end of the Earth but the studio wouldn’t fund it. I’m not sure it would have added anything. The uniting of George and Weena, however it turned out, was, I think, the right choice.

 

I’ve been thinking I’ve been a victim of time travel lately. Only to the worst of times. 

 

After all, Orange Voldemort wants to take over the midterms, while he’s bombing Iran and Oracle is running Medicare. How could this be good?

 

The Population Bomb

The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich, came out in 1968.

 

It predicted world famines due to uncontrolled population growth. Ehrlich took from several sources, but most of them were fundamentally based on Malthusianism, which came, unsurprisingly, from Thomas Malthus. Malthus noticed that the increasing farming production was linear because it was predicated on increasing the area upon which the farming had to operate. Doubling the yield requires doubling the area farmed. He further noted that population growth is exponential. Since exponential growth outpaces linear growth, there would inevitably be a point where demand outpaced construction, resulting in famine or war.

 

Malthus wrote this up in 1798, before the Industrial Revolution. Often, critics of Malthus and his adherents point to the impact industrialization would have on farming, changing the linear increase to a more own exponential one. Mechanized agriculture really got going after World War II. In addition, the scientific explosion in the same period culminated in the Green Revolution, a movement beginning at the dawn of the 20^th century and continuing through the eighties. 

 

This did involve mechanized agriculture. It also included developing new varieties of cereals, increased use of artificial fertilizer, and new farming techniques. This pushed up yields to keep pace with the continuing growth of population. 

 

Thus, the big criticism of Ehrlich’s work was that it seemed to ignore progress that had already been made and was ongoing. Instead, he painted an alarming collection of scenarios. These days, there are famines, but they are more a consequence of war and political unrest rather than causing it. There is enough food grown to keep people from starving. The issues of getting food to people without wasting it have not yet been completely solved. Still, it is getting there—at least, on the technical side. 

 

So, anyone who takes TPB, and Ehrlich himself, seriously is a fool. There’s no problem with population increase. If something gets in the way, infinite human ingenuity will solve it. We can feed everybody, so everything Ehrlich said is wrong.

 

Far be it from me to discount human innovation, but I don’t think this is exactly correct.

 

Years ago, I was in a lunchtime conversation with a co-worker. He said that since the caribou were thriving in the Arctic, all of the efforts to help the caribou—the extra construction to preserve their migration patterns, etc.—were unnecessary. My position was that if the caribou were thriving, it was because of those extra efforts rather than despite them. We agreed to disagree.

 

In 2026, we have 8.3 billion people.

 

I believe we can probably feed 10 billion people. But I don’t think that is a complete metric. Right now, we produce 450 million tonnes of plastic/year—up from 2 million tonnes of plastic/year in 1950. One tonne equals 1000 kilograms. So that is 450 billion kilograms/year. There are 8.3 billion people right now, so that results in 54 kilograms/year/person. If we had 1 billion people, that could result in a decrease to 6.5 kg/person or 6.5 billion tonnes/year. That is just one metric.

 

Scale matters.

 

(Note: Of course, the production of plastic consumption is even across the world. Given how the developing world is advancing, it might well become so. That would make the problem worse.)

 

There has been a lot of discussion over the last few years about the decrease in reproductive rate. China is worried about it. Japan is facing it. That said, even with the worldwide reduction of population, we are locked into having over ten billion people by 2061. That peak won’t be reached until 2085, after which it will start to drop. (See here.) Essentially, the currently large, adult cohorts have to grow older and die while the smaller, younger cohorts have to grow up under them. The corporate state wants that expanding market and those young purchasers. 

 

The proposed solution is to increase the birth rate to keep up the size of that younger cohort. Most of the publicity seems to be around the need for productive, younger workers. My feeling is more cynical: we need to keep up that younger buying power to prop up corporate sales. However, according to some sources, jobs are on the decline in the near term. Some of this is likely due to AI, but not all. Productivity per unit person has been rising steadily for a long time. Jobs are a reflection of supply and demand. As demand for a product goes up, supply has to meet it. Jobs have to create that supply.

 

However, as workers become more productive (add in here AI and automation), the number of jobs required for that supply is either smaller or may be reduced. This creates a strange disconnect: a larger number of people to demand product, fewer people to create product, fewer people with the purchasing power to buy product, reduction in demand. 

 

It is, of course, not that simple in the real world, but the trends are still there.

 

The idea behind Malthus original idea—that resource supply and resource demand are governed by different paradigms—is still valid. There’s a finite amount of oil in the world and the cost to extract that oil increases over time. Thus, there may be an infinite demand for oil, but there cannot be an infinite supply. This is true for any finite resource. Only the slopes of the curves are different.

 

Right now, a substantial percentage of the supply of habitable land is dedicated to the production of food. This has been estimated from 32% to over 50%. It has been increasing in correspondence with the population this whole time. The numbers Malthus (and Ehrlich) predicted have not come to pass, but the fact of that disconnect has happened. 

 

We have even developed a conceptual language to describe the problem: sustainable agriculture. Renewable agriculture. The underlying problem—the increase in the number of people—is out of fashion these days, but people still see the consequence: loss of land. Loss of wild areas. Air and water pollution. Crowded cities. 

 

Imagine a world where we had a tenth of the population—800 million people. Finite resources would last longer. Pollution would be considerably reduced. 

 

But we don’t. We have 8.3 billion people now and over 10 billion soon.

 

As Musk and others have said, the sky is falling. The question is, what do we do about it?

 

Increasing the birth rate is a non-starter. I don’t know about you, but I’m not enthused about the Asimov world in The Caves of Steel, where we all live in some megalopolis surrounded by vast hills and plains dedicated to farming.

 

The next century is going to require careful planning, a lot of automation, and probably robots—lots of robots—to get us over the hump and our numbers down to a manageable level. China is going gangbusters toward automation. So is Japan. Japan and Korea are hitting this problem right now. They are trying to find solutions right now. We should be following them closely, helping them towards a solution, and then adapting their ideas to our own dilemma. We need to find a new way to handle economies—ever-expanding revenue based on a new generation of people is just not going to work.

 

We’re smart. We can do this. Just like we handled global warming.

 

Oh. Right.

 

And, in that vein, the Federal Judicial Center puts together analytical papers to help judges adjudicate complex technical and scientific cases. Republican criticism caused them to pull the entire climate section from their new “Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence.” See here and here.

 

Oh, and EPA enforcement of environmental laws has pretty much collapsed over the last year.

 

As an added bonus, RFJ Jr’s top vaccine advisor questions whether we should get polio shots.

 

Consideration of Works Past: The Broken Sword

 

I had trouble with Lord of the Rings.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

Fantasy often just escapes me. I rarely find it compelling. This is my own character flaw, and I don’t suggest it’s any kind of literary judgment. Everybody’s different. 

 

I was in college, and my friends (both of them) were all saying how I had to read Lord of the Rings. It would make me grow three inches taller, improve my love life, and allow me to reach enlightenment. I went to the bookstore, looked on the shelves, bought The Two Towers, went home, and read it.

 

I know The Two Towers is the middle section in what was intended to be one, very large book. It’s like starting King Lear with Act II. Surprise: I didn’t find it compelling. In my own defense, you have to read Lord of the Rings and Appendix B all the way through to understand the scale of the work. I was in college. Hm. Read Lord of the Rings or study thermodynamics. Every week a quiz, every week a chance to fail. Or read three hundred thousand words of fantasy. 

 

Thermodynamics, every time.

 

Then, I happened on Henry Beard and Douglas Kinney’s very fine parody, Bored of the Rings, which I very much enjoyed. But, as I hadn’t read Lord of the Rings, I didn’t get it in depth. So, I went back to Lord of the Rings and read it using BOTR as a reader’s guide. Okay, now I understood what people were trying to tell me. I still wasn’t a Lord of the Rings fundamentalist. (I never finished The Silmarillion, for example. I’ve read the Bible, thanks. I don’t need to read it twice.) 

 

That said, Lord of the Rings had all of the things about fantasy I have trouble with: angelic elves, noble princes, valiant peasants, and a dark evil lord. I really liked the dwarves and how Legolas and Gimli became close friends despite the long antagonism between elves and dwarves. There’s a novel I’d like to read.

 

That’s not a problem with The Broken Sword. (See? This is a post about The Broken Sword.)

 

Note: I’m going to discuss some essential spoilers.

 

The Broken Sword is a fantasy by Poul Anderson that is, at minimum, inspired by Norse mythology. It is the story of Skafloc, a human child taken by Imric the elf lord before he can be christened. He is replaced by a half-elf, half-troll changeling who is named Valgard. The broken sword of the title is a mythic weapon delivered by the Aesir (Possibly Odin. It’s not so clear.) as a birth gift to Imric for Skafloc. Imric is not keen on this. The gifts of the gods are often two-edged.

 

First, the morality of the elves is not even close to angelic. Leea, Imric’s wife, nurses Skafloc as a baby and later is his lover. In a magical ritual, Imric rapes a troll woman he has kept prisoner for close to a thousand years, creating Valgard. 

 

There are three main characters in the novel. Skafloc, the foster child of the elves. Valgard, the changeling son foisted on Orm and his family. And Freda, one of the daughters of Orm. 

 

The story resembles a Greek tragedy in that by the end of it, no one is left standing. The hint is that the entire tale is a product of the Aesir plotting to get the broken sword remade. The destruction of the three main characters and all of the elf and troll kingdoms is just collateral damage to their machinations. 

 

And they are so destroyed. Valgard finds out his heritage and throws in with the trolls in their long enmity with the elves, sacrificing his family in the process. Skafloc leads a raiding party against the trolls that proves disastrous, but he manages to escape with some of his troops and Freda. The two of them fall in love. (Yes. They are brother and sister. Which doesn’t mean much in elf culture.) 

 

The trolls attack the elves and win. Valgard becomes a lord in the very same kingdom that Imric had ruled. But his own knowledge of who he is eats away at him.

 

Skafloc and Freda discover who they are and it breaks their relationships. In despair, Skafloc manages to get the broken sword reforged and uses it with great success against the occupying trolls. The sword kills anyone nearby whenever it is drawn. Freda goes back to her village and, now pregnant with Skafloc’s child, manages to begin a new life. Then, Skafloc shows up and his sword kills her new possible husband. Freda throws him out of the house and subsequently gives birth to Skafloc’s child. Odin comes and takes it away.

 

With nothing left, Freda decides to seek Skafloc out after all. Skafloc, meanwhile, is locked in mortal combat with Valgard when Freda finds him and calls out his name. Distracted, Valgard kills him. But the sword, tossed from Skafloc’s dying hand, kills Valgard. Freda is left alive but mad.

 

There is nothing left of these people’s lives but ground glass.

 

Now, remember, I read this right after I read Lord of the Rings.

 

Anderson, here, was the anti-Tolkien. 

 

The Broken Sword was considerably shorter than Lord of the Rings. It was also nasty, brutal, and bloody. For all the bloodshed in Lord of the Rings, it’s an astonishingly clean fantasy. The Broken Sword is filled with disembowelments and the cleaving of skulls. The deaths of your brother troops are unfortunate but expected—there’s little mourning. There is also no redemption. People do bad things, enjoy bad things, and often succeed because of those bad things. 

 

Let us recall the setting of this, as far as I was concerned. The Broken Sword was first published in 1954—the same year that Lord of the Rings started being published. Anderson rewrote The Broken Sword in 1971. 

 

I read Lord of the Rings in 1972. Subsequently, I read The Broken Sword. The Vietnam War (US version) had been going on for years. (1972 was, coincidentally, my year for the draft. I was not drafted.) The accounts of the My Lai Massacre were published in 1969. The Pentagon Papers were published in 1971. Every night, Walter Cronkite reported the events of the war on the news. (Nixon’s reelection also happened in 1972, but that was after I read these two books.)

 

Is it really such a surprise in that particular context that I wasn’t quite so interested in Lord of the Rings but gravitated to The Broken Sword? In The Broken Sword, war was portrayed graphically. There was nothing noble about it on either side. This was not the forces of right against the forces of darkness. These were brutal grabs for power from both sides. There was no moral high ground anywhere to be found. 

 

I have rarely written of any sort of war. For one reason, I don’t feel qualified. 

 

For another, I think it’s hard to write about war without romanticizing it, either for the good—see Lord of the Rings—or the bad—see The Broken Sword. 

 

We’re seeing that right now. Orange Voldemort and his ilk are describing utterly brutal acts as if the perpetrators were merely defending themselves against evil, paid agitators. I like what Stephen Colbert said about them. The Nazis weren’t afraid to show their faces.