Mostly, Give the Audience What We Want

The International stars Clive Owen as an Interpol agent and Naomi Watts as an assistant New York District Attorney. Normally in any thriller starring young and attractive stars such as Owen and Watts, romance would bloom between them. In The International, however, director Tom Tykwer and screenwriter Eric Singer only wanted to suggest an attraction between Owen and Watts’ characters, never to be fulfilled; it was their intention to stress the job, the case, over any romantic elements.

The only problem is, that’s not what we want. What is worse, it isn’t what we expect. There is no way to structure a marketing campaign for the movie that stresses what it doesn’t include; anyway the marketers don’t want to advertise lines like ‘You know that romantic element you like in thrillers? We don’t have that in our movie.’

But when they do set up the marketing to make it look like a sexy, fast-paced conspiracy thriller, they promise what the film does not deliver. The billing alone promises us romance; we expect romance; when the filmmakers don’t deliver, we are going to be disappointed.

The way around this for Tykwer and Singer would be to cast unsexy, character actors in the two leading roles. Owen is a leading man, and Watts is a leading lady. These are the kind of actors who get the money-men to green-light a big expensive production like this. The producers did not do their job in allowing Tykwer and Singer to sabotage the audience expectations for romance.

The rule is, therefore, ‘Mostly, give the audience what we want.’

There is a qualification to this, based on the fact that part of what we want is to be surprised. But we only want to be surprised in entertaining ways.

The only way to make a twist like this contravention to our expectations work, is to build it into the structure of the movie – make it work for the movie. The most-cited example of this is in Hitchcock’s Psycho when star Janet Leigh’s character is killed at the mid-point of the plot structure. This works because shock and terror are the forms of entertainment we seek in this movie genre. We don’t believe the star’s character is going to be killed; when she is, we are horrified; we can scarcely believe what we have just witnessed; and we know that nothing henceforth in this movie will conform to our comfortable conventional expectations.

I suppose that the creators of The International might have found some way to make the lack of romance work – but I don’t see how.

— asotir

Gratitude

A man beats his 6-year old daughter until she loses her right eye. After recovering, the girl thanks her father for having spared her left eye. ‘He blessed me with my left eye vision,’ the girl exclaimed happily.

This spring the Red River flooded half a town. On Sunday the river crested and began to subside. The townsfolk gathered at church to thank God for having spared the other half of the town. ‘The Lord blessed us,’ the parishioners exclaimed happily.

Weeks ago, a pastor in Haiti lost his son in the chaos of the earthquake. He later found his son’s remains buried in the rubble of the boy’s school. The pastor thanked God for having returned the boy’s corpse. ‘God blessed me,’ the man exclaimed happily.

The dictator sent half his populace into forced-labor camps, and when they grew too weak from starvation to be much use, he had them all killed. The remaining populace gathered in the capital square and thanked the dictator for sparing them. ‘He blessed us with continued life,’ the crowds exclaimed happily.

Is there a difference? What is the difference?

— asotir

First Person Snare: Addendum

A couple of days ago, in discussing Robert A Heinlein’s novel Glory Road mention was made of the First Person Snare – the trap a talesman braves when he writes an immersive tale in the first person. The danger is that the talesman put too much of himself into his narrator, who ought to be more of an empty vessel for the reader to fill, in order that the tale be as immersive as possible. The danger is worsened when the talesman himself is a very different personality than the outward circumstances of his narrator-protagonist would dictate.

Heinlein, the 50-year old curmudgeon, wrote the tale of a 23-year old innocent, and the innocent’s words sounded suspiciously like those of a 50-year old curmudgeon.

There is this much excuse to grant Heinlein: that the tale is written by the hero long after he has gone through the adventures he faces on Glory Road; in the intervening years he has suffered disillusion and grown older, wiser, and more cynical (and curmudgeonly, perhaps).

So, logically speaking, Heinlein has his reasons.

But logic is a poor defense in talesmanship. At the time we read of these early adventures, Gordon is still an innocent 23-year old. And in order to immerse ourselves in the tale, we must accept and adopt that 23-year old persona ourselves – without reference to a later, older Gordon.

Heinlein could have side-stepped all the discord we felt when we read Gordon’s remarks along the way, had Heinlein merely added such phrases now and then as ‘Looking back on the incident…’ (And to be fair, the tale opens with the older Gordon informing us that he knows of another world, and ‘I could go back there. I could—’)

But every such remark as ‘Looking back on it…’ serves to remind us that Gordon survived this particular danger, and lived on to tell of it. This is to lessen the suspense, our fear that Gordon might fail, and fall, vying with our hope that Gordon will win through. It also makes us aware that we are not hearing of one Gordon, but of two: the older man writing the memoir, and the younger one who lived it.

In order to immerse ourselves in the tale, we must be undivided in our allegiance and identification. We can only be, in this case, the 23-year old man on the Glory Road, for he is indispensable; the older man exists only to tell us of what the younger man experienced. The older man might be our principal focus; we might still immerse ourselves in his tale; but then we would need constant reminders of the physical surroundings and circumstances of the older man; what we would be diving into would be the tale of an older man reminded of his youth, regretting it or longing to return to it; we would need to follow the older man forward through some events in the ‘present time’ in between recollections ‘back in my past.’

It can be tricky, for naturally the older man writing down his exploits for us will look on things differently than he did when he lived them. One way for Heinlein to go would have been to forego the introductory remarks, the ‘I could go back to that world—’ page. But this page brings us a great deal of suspense – most of the suspense, in fact – for the second half of the tale, after he has won through the dangerous Quest on Glory Road, and settles down with his Princess to ‘happily ever after.’ Once the Kingdom is won, the hero and his beloved have everything they could have wanted. There is no danger, no opposition, no conflict for many pages. Only one suspense takes us through these paradisical descriptions: our knowledge, gleaned from that opening page, that the Hero is destined to lose this paradise. He will leave the Kingdom and be sundered from his Princess; and we wonder, Why? What happened to ruin it?

Heinlein seems more interested, indeed, in examining the unpleasant aspects of living ‘happily ever after,’ than in the Quest and adventure itself. He seems almost to rush through the dangers; but then he rushes through the ‘life afterwards’ and then he rushes through the ‘after I lost it all’ back on Earth – and the conclusion must be that Heinlein simply was telling his tale briskly, guided by his training in the pulps.

— asotir

(Composed 12 May 2010 on keyboard)

Before and After in Heinlein’s Later Tales

Robert A Heinlein was a science-fiction writer, one of the 3 or 4 most acclaimed of the golden age. Some of his tales deal heavily in social philosophy – political, sexual, inter-personal. As he left the pulps and slicks magazine markets behind and wrote more novels for hardback publication (and as he gained in prestige and fame and grew more comfortable financially), Heinlein’s tales began to change. Large sections of the novels consisted of little more than a character lecturing other characters about love and sex, taxes, political freedoms and duties, and other social mores.

Since we’ve been reading some Heinlein lately, let’s look at the three tales and see how they work. The three are:

1. Stranger in a Strange Land (the original 220,000-word manuscript submission)
2. Double Star
3. Glory Road

Stranger in a Strange Land

This is maybe Heinlein’s most famous tale. It has been credited with helping launch the hippie movement and the sexual revolution in the USA. It gestated long in Heinlein’s mind, over a decade passing between the time when his wife Virginia first suggested the idea of ‘an Earthman raised by aliens’ until he submitted the manuscript to his publishers.

The basic story tells of Michael Valentine Smith, born on Mars but soon orphaned, the sole survivor of the first human expedition to the planet. He is raised by Martians. No one on Earth knows about this until some 20 years later when the second Martian expedition reaches the planet.

Mike is brought back to Earth, and some unique circumstances make him a very rich and powerful personage legally. As a side note, let’s look at those circumstances – they teach us something about talesmanship.

Mike is the only offspring of a human married couple. Both his mother and her husband were brilliant, she invented what would later turn out to be the essential power source for interplanetary travel.

This alone would grant Mike immense wealth. But Heinlein is not yet satisfied.

Mike’s natural father was not his mother’s husband but the captain of the ship, and the captain had no heirs, so Mike inherits both his legal parents’ estates, and his natural fathers. More: the entire crew entered into a legal relationship stipulating that all their estates would accrue to the last survivor, should some accident happen on Mars. These estates have been handled over the past 20 years by a foundation, which is now very wealthy indeed. (This gimmick echoes H G Wells’ When the Sleeper Wakes.) Mike owns a big chunk of the Moon as a result (actually he owns about a fifth of the corporation that owns the Moon). That should ensure that Mike is the richest and one of the most powerful humans on Earth. But Heinlein is still not satisfied.

A complicated chain of legal decisions (elaborated at length in the tale) sets the precedent that Mike also ‘owns’ Mars. This means, legally speaking, all natural resources on Mars, and all landing rights, visiting rights, tourist rights, etc., belong solely to one Michael Valentine Smith. This guarantees Mike not only the promise of immense future wealth, but also political power (depending on what minerals and other resources are found on Mars).

In terms of the tale, and what later develops, all that’s important is that Mike should be fabulously wealthy, enough so that he can found his church later in the story. But Heinlein has become interested in legal ramifications of discovery, explorers’ pacts, and the like. Page after page is devoted to the maneuverings this complex of inheritance brings to Mike, only to end, about half way through, with a neat and very sudden solution – the whole matter is dropped after that, like some toy Heinlein tired of (or maybe he realized that it was getting too cumbersome and he extricated his tale from it at the earliest moment he could).

And one of these would have sufficed; Heinlein gives us all three. This not only complicates things needlessly in the opening third of the tale, it leads into a too-neat, too-easy solution when Heinlein decides to drop it. These speculations do however interest sf fans in and of themselves, for we enjoy speculating on ‘what ifs’ of a grand historical as well as scientific and cultural scale. In no other genre, perhaps, would Heinlein have gotten away with it. Indeed, he might not have gotten away with it in sf, had he been only a novice and not one of the big poobahs of the industry, whose name was enough to guarantee a certain number of sales. (No novice, maybe, could have sold a tale in 1961 that was about group sex and marriage, either!)

Heinlein’s interest in plausible speculations interferes with the talesmanship from page one, which opens with a fairly long discourse on the criteria best suited to choosing a crew to operate a space ship for several months on end. This leads to a crew of 4 married couples, which then sets up Mike’s parentage; the affair between Mike’s mother and natural father prefigures the group sex-marriages Mike will create in his church (but too little is made of this).

But once Mike is back on Earth, in the huge naval hospital outside Washington DC, and in danger, threatened by forces interested in controlling his wealth and potential political power, the tale gets going. This is the only part of the tale that works all-out as a tale. The events follow logically in sequence, cause gives rise to effect, interesting characters come on scene, with witty dialogue that is nicely balanced to the descriptive and action paragraphs. Suspense holds and mounts, and along with suspense, sf fans can delight in the appreciation of Mike’s very-Martian, unhuman way of looking at life and society, and the gradual revelation of his superhuman powers, something like a yogi’s mastery of himself raised to the last degree.

Mike’s powers fall into two classes. First there is his control over his own body. He can enter sleep so profound it looks more like death; slow down or speed up his sense of time; heal his wounds, cure illness in himself, grow muscles, change the shape of his bones and facial features, age or grow younger. Second he has control over external objects as well: he can make things move with his mind, he can read other people’s minds and communicate mentally with some, and he can push people and objects into nonexistence by willing it.

The initial intrigues over who will control Mike (or will they murder him?) end when Mike finds a guardian and teacher, Jubal. What follows is a series of discussions of Martian versus human philosophies, and the tale falters.

Mike then takes about a third of the book off in wandering around, trying different occupations, trying to figure out what makes humans really tick. When he finds out, he feels it is his duty to teach us Martian ways, and the tool he chooses is his church (but ‘It’s not a religion,’ he insists.) This dovetails into what is most controversial about the tale: not only is Heinlein advocating free love, nudism, and group marriage, but he does so as part of religious services. He also concocts a new fundamentalist Christian church, the Church of the New Revelation, inspired by Mormonism and the evangelical movements that swept the Southwestern United States in the 1920s and 1930s.

Stranger in a Strange Land ends up looking and feeling a lot like Candide and there is a strong feeling of social satire and Enlightenment-iconoclastic moral philosophy to the tale. If we could extract the first third (minus the 20 pages or so leading up to Mike in Walter Reed Hospital) we would have a terrific tale with all the elements for a good pulp page-turner. The rest, mixing carnival tents, tattooed ladies, church crusades and sex, fails as tale and holds our interest mainly because of the erotic appeal, the humor, the wittiness of the dialogue (even down to a section of art criticism several pages long), and curiosity in the lifestyle Mike advocates (‘Would it work? Could it work?’)

Double Star

Double Star tells the tale of out of work actor Larry Smith (billed as ‘the great Lorenzo’) who impersonates a kidnapped politician who heads a major political party in the solar system. In essence the tale reworks Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda. As with Stranger the beginning scenes are filled with suspense and action, each scene is handled in concrete terms and flows logically and immediately into the following scene.

There is a small diversion when Smith learns just who it is he is to impersonate – a discussion of interplanetary politics intrudes, and we explore hypnosis and what later thinkers would call ‘anchoring’ – and there is no action at all, other than discussions, on the long flight to Mars. Heinlein doesn’t take Smith around on the ship, and nothing much happens, and the passages drag.

The Martian sequences pick up the action, but at the crucial scenes of climax – when Smith is adopted by a Martian clan, and then must handle press conferences and meetings as the politician – Heinlein seems hardly interested; the scenes are not detailed, and no snags offer us any hint of suspense or danger. The mores of the Martians are raised to make a crucial plot point – then they are dropped entirely. The tale seems to be heading into a story of Smith on Mars; he then leaves Mars and the tale shifts entirely.

What closes out the book is a summary, rather abstract and handled mostly in narrative summary, of the political campaign that will seat the next Imperial Parliament. The only scenes worthy of the name consider Smith’s personal and private meeting with the Emperor Willem IV, the only one who sees through the disguise. The Emperor thus seems to rise as a major character, but he’s dropped as soon as he approves of the impersonation.

The second half of Double Star seems confused, as though Heinlein had lost his train of the tale, and wasn’t sure any longer just what kind of tale he was undertaking. Maybe he changed his mind. When compared to The Prisoner of Zenda, the second half of Double Star is woefully weak, and hardly worth reading. (And since so much of what’s good about the opening of Double Star never pays off in the end, we can say the whole story is not worth reading as a tale proper.)

Glory Road

Glory Road tells of E C Gordon, a young man who fights in Vietnam in 1962, is wounded, discharged, and ends up on a nude beach in France, where he meets a lovely blonde who takes him on an interdimensional quest of great danger and different cultures. He survives the quest and wins the object of it, whereupon he learns the blonde is in fact the Empress (or ‘Wisdom’) of Twenty Universes.

The second half is where the tale drops into summary narrative and cultural speculation mode. Unhappy as the Empress’ Consort, Gordon returns to Earth, where he is equally unhappy with ‘normal life’ as a draftsman in Los Angeles or student at Caltech. In the end he seeks another adventurous quest. Today, we could read this as a treatise on the appeal, and potential danger, of immersive videogames; in 1963 Heinlein had in mind the newly-revived books of Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as those of Robert E Howard, Anthony Hope, and all the pulp tales of adventure.

As with Stranger, the second half of Glory Road interests not as a tale, but rather as sociological and sexual speculation. But the sex is not so potent; Gordon passes up almost every proposition the beauties of several universes offer him. An entire novel could have been told around Gordon’s dissatisfaction (or ‘acculturation’ as he calls it) with life back on Earth, and it might have been moving to a Romantic talesman. Heinlein however is a satirist and humorist more than romantic, bringing to mind Walpole’s dictum that ‘the world is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think.’

Conclusions

The sum is: an extended discussion of philosophy, sociology, and the like, ought to conform to the rules of talesmanship just like any other element: it ought to advance the story itself. But we readers don’t insist on that for discussions or any other elements, so long as they entertain us sufficiently. In that case, they are a weakness we are more than willing to suffer.

The question then arises, whether a grand opening to a tale that lets us down in the second half, is worthy of our attention. It doesn’t conclude properly speaking. It doesn’t pay off what it plants. Plot threads are woven in, then the stitches dropped, the threads abandoned. But for those moments when we are engaged in the opening scenes, we are entertained.

— asotir

(Composed 12 May 2010 on keyboard)

The Genius of DuMaurier

The empty vessel first person that is equally a character. Brilliant.

Yesterday we mentioned Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca and The Scapegoat in light of a tale told in the first person in which the narrator has no real character, but functions instead as a stand-in for us readers, who can imagine thereby ourselves truly acting and being acted upon within the tale, experiencing its adventure, danger, and romance. But these two tales go beyond the simple tale as experience.

In both these tales, DuMaurier created empty vessel narrators whose defining character was precisely that – they were what might be called ‘deficient in personality’ (there surely is a medical term for this type of personality). This means that, while both narrators are perfect empty vessels, they also function as full literary characters, i.e., they have personalities. Those personalities just happen to be empty.

They are both also never named in their tales – even better.

In both cases it is the lack of personal development in the narrator-protagonist that causes him to be drawn into the shadow of the stronger personality that looms over the locus of the tale. And thus in both cases part of the struggle of the protagonists involves resisting this influence; part of the suspense lies in the question, ‘Will that shadowy Other completely submerge our hero?’

We can enjoy these tales as either analyses of these deficient personality protagonists, or as immersive tales.

There are differences between the two tales. In Rebecca, the nameless heroine is never confused with the first Mrs deWinter; no one, she fears could ever admire her who knew the mistress of Manderley before her. And Rebecca is dead; it is her specter that haunts the stage; the challenge of the heroine is to take control over the household on her own terms, in her own name, without feeling daunted by that personality in the grand portrait. But in The Scapegoat the nameless hero is forced to assume the name of his double in the provincial French household. This is far more in keeping with the model of Double Star and The Prisoner of Zenda we discussed yesterday. In the course of discovering the glass blowing business and the relations within the château, the hero finds that Jacques is not a very nice fellow at all, and sets out to do his best to undermine and undo the plans and former actions of the man who has thrust his identity upon our English schoolmaster nonentity. And Jacques is alive, and may return at any time – indeed he does return, and the suspense then turns on whether the narrator’s plans for the business and ménage will hold up, or whether Jacques will sell the business and betray his family, as he had intended before meeting the narrator and, struck with their uncommon likeness, forced upon him the switch in identities.

The Scapegoat is thus a more interesting tale from this point of view. But it lacks much suspense, since life in the château is something of a welcome vacation to the hero, and he is not committed to anything he does there; commitment and engagement only gradually overtake him. His is a tale of a man of mild tastes and middle age – the storm and stress of youth are long behind him. Rebecca on the other hand holds a high level of storm and stress, for it is a young woman’s tale, and involves her very real hopes and fears for a fulfilling life – a life she has not yet lived. It also engages us on a much deeper, more primal level: the level of the fairy tale and Bildungsroman.

— asotir

(Composed 10 May 2010 on keyboard)

First Person Snare

In Robert A. Heinlein’s Glory Road the narrator, a 23-year-old college dropout, ex-Army, Vietnam vet, sounds suspiciously like the narrator in a lot of other first-person narratives authored by Heinlein. A lot like Heinlein himself.

This similarity sneaks into the story as it goes along. At the beginning, where the narrator, E. C. Gordon, talks about his history as a young man, family relationships, and education, the focus is so strongly on what makes Gordon different from Heinlein that it keeps Heinlein honest, if you will. We readers are never far from considering Gordon as a man born about 1940 who played high school football in the 1950s and served in Vietnam when Kennedy was President.

But then the story shifts, as Gordon is taken to another universe by a witch he calls Star, a beautiful nude blonde he meets on an islet in the Mediterranean. On alternate worlds Gordon acts as the Hero of Romance out of a hundred tales, and the focus now concerns Gordon’s reactions to these alien worlds and lifestyles as an American and Earthman. And here Gordon seems to be much better-read than the kid we learned about, and to express a more mature man’s views. In short, he starts to sound a lot more like Robert A. Heinlein.

One of the strengths of the first person narrative is its immersive quality, the ease by which we readers can identify with the narrator-protagonist, and live out his experiences vicariously. The narrator becomes an empty vessel or shell into which we project ourselves. We become the universal Hero walking Glory Road, aided by the sexy witch and an ugly, comedic sidekick. Or we become the private eye investigating murder in a corrupt Los Angeles, or the assassin of an unnamed government agency, or the second Mrs DeWinter.

For this hollow vessel to perform its function well, it has to be empty. It needs a surface only (preferably an attractive one of good physical fitness, handsome face and form, and a ready wit and intelligence) and its interior characteristics must be of aptitude and talent only, and nothing that would normally fall into the category of ‘character.’ This protagonist must be as much like ourselves as possible, except maybe slightly better – a little smarter, more educated, tougher, more intuitive, cleverer. Any aspects of his character that would shatter our identification must be avoided.

But even as the author hopes we readers will identify with his narrator-protagonist, he himself also wants to do so, and this is the snare for the author. When the author identifies too much himself with the narrator, he is apt to make the narrator likewise too much like himself. Then the narrator begins to have a specific character: the character of the author.

It is of course no fault that the narrator have a character, so long as this character is a proper literary character – in other words, so long as the character is true to himself. In this case, the character no longer serves as the hollow vessel through which we readers can vicariously live another more glamorous life, but acts instead as a traditional character out of a tale.

But when the author identifies with a narrator wholly unlike himself, and begins to assert over the narrator his own traits, we readers find the result discordant, jarring. Something isn’t right here. A 23-year old man doesn’t have the attitudes of a 50-year old man, and doesn’t remember the early 1940s, when he was a toddler, as though he were a grown and working man at the time.

This is something for anyone writing in the first person to remember. The narrating character can fall into two categories: either the empty vessel, without any meaningful inner life beyond that which the circumstances of the story provide; or the usual character who has come from a specific time and place, with a character of his own.

The only way around these choices is when the origins of the character closely mirror those of the author himself. So had Heinlein been writing aobut a 50-year old balding professional pulp writer who had dropped out of the military due to ill health, and the rest of whose background circumstances mirrored Heinlein’s own life, then he could have given us Heinlein the Unconquerable Hero as fully as he pleased.

(Composed 10 May 2010 on keyboard)

The Pleasures of Misery

I recently read a novel by Robert A. Heinlein called Double Star. It is a reworking of Anthony Hope’s classic The Prisoner of Zenda with an alternate ending. Zenda ends unhappily (in some senses) while Double Star ends happily. It is this change that prompts these reflections.

In The Prisoner of Zenda an Englishman visits the Central European kingdom of Ruritania, where his exact likeness to its King (a distant relative) enmeshes him in pretending to be the king, who has been kidnapped. In the course of the tale the Englishman woos the Princess Flavia and wins her heart; engages in sword battles with the evil Prince and would-be usurper of the throne; storms a castle and rescues the king. At tale’s end the Englishman, his deeds known only to a few co-conspirators, Flavia, and the King himself, leaves Ruritania to return to his ‘ordinary’ life in England. Behind him he leaves a throne he could well have commanded, and a beautiful Princess whose heart will be forever his, though duty has commanded her to remain and wed the King, and serve as Ruritania’s Queen.

In Double Star an American actor is hired to portray a prominent politician who has been kidnapped; in the course of this tale the actor is adopted into a clan of noble Martians; delivers speeches and runs a campaign for Prime Minister of the Solar System’s Empire; and finally must adopt the guise forever, when the politician suffers a heart attack and dies even as his party wins a majority in the Imperial Parliament. Oh yes, the actor also wins the heart of the politician’s Girl Friday, who had been wholly in love with the politician; he marries her and they have children, and the actor enjoys a long career of 25+ years as the politician.

So the two tales follow parallel paths, though in Ruritania swords are used more, and on New Batavia, the lunar seat of the Empire, it is rather speeches and words the hero employs. The paths however diverge drastically only at the end.

In Zenda the imposter succeeds in rescuing the King, and thereby ensures he must himself leave behind crown, kingdom, and Princess. This makes the ending bitter-sweet, although it confirms Rudolph Rassendyll as ‘the noblest Rasendyll of them all’ in his selfless act of giving up all that he has won. He must return to the humdrum life he left behind in London – a life that will, we are sure, be rendered all the more colorless by the fact that before he had not been in love, and now he is, forever – to Flavia who will be the wife of another, forever lost to Rudolph.

In Double Star the imposter succeeds in impersonating the politician and rewriting and delivering speeches so as to bring victory to his party. Smith is ready indeed to return to the acting life and leave the imposture behind him, only author Heinlein acts as the deus ex machina and bumps off the real politician by a heart attack or stroke, the result of drugs given him during his abduction. Thus Smith must take the brass ring, and enjoy power, fame, and the love of a good woman. (This can be seen as ironical on Heinlein’s part, for Smith never was interested in politics before, and in fact if he had any political leanings they were completely opposed to those of the Expansionist Party he will now head and whose reforms he will see enacted.)

Both of the stories deal almost explicitly with the notion that the tale is a sort of daydream or wish fulfillment on the part of the reader. The act of pretending to be the hero is doubled within the tale itself, whose hero must pretend to be a greater and more prestigious man – a man whose life comes with a very attractive love-interest built-in. We must, as readers, surrender the daydream when we finish the tale and close the book, but nothing stops the hero-imposter from continuing his dream job.

So it would seem that we’d enjoy the tale best if the protagonist wins everything he wishes. The Heinlein solution looks better than the Hope solution.

But, is it so?

There is some sort of pleasure in the misery of the Hope solution. Maybe it lies in Aristotle’s notion of the purging of emotions we experience when following a well-designed tragedy. Or maybe it lies in the feelings of greater nobility we get when we identify with the self-sacrificing Rudolph. Or maybe it has something to do with the glow of feeling that we have ourselves been bettered, even ennobled, by the reading of a light tale of adventurous derring-do.

Whatever the cause, for yours truly at least, the ending of Zenda seems much to be preferred to that of Double Star.

(Composed 10 May 2010 by keyboard)