Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

 Just finished: The White Mountains by John Christopher. This came up in a discussion with friends when I was quite drunk, so I read it. The protagonist, Will, lives in a small, vaguely medieval village, where everyone is "capped" when they turn 14. It's a coming-of-age ritual but PLOT TWIST it's actually aliens and the caps are mind-control devices that stifle creative or rebellious thought; the pastoral medievalism is post-apocalyptic, and after meeting an uncapped adult, Will and his cousin book it from the village in search of a place where the aliens aren't in control. If this sounds like the plot of every YA dystopian book ever, yuuuup, except it was written in 1967, as the tropes of the genre were just being worked out, so it's more influential than cliché. It's part of a series and I may end up reading the other ones.

Currently reading: The Hollow Earth by Dr. Raymond Bernard. @grimjim gave me this while decluttering his book collection, and it is a classic of the conspiracy genre. The Hollow Earth (the Earth has openings at both poles to a hollow interior that is perfect in climate, has a secondary sun, and houses an advanced civilization and that's where UFOs come from) is my all-time favourite conspiracy theory, and if I ever finish my current novel (sigh) series, I have a vaguely formed idea for a story based on it, though I'm sure lots of people have beat me to the punch there.

Obviously it is bonkers but it is like, also the cutest, most innocuous conspiracy theory compared to the shitty ones that dominate the zeitgeist so it's very relaxing to read.

Comments

[dragonlady7]

> cutest, most innocuous conspiracy theory

I feel like this is a conversation I always wind up having whenever I'm in new company but oh my gosh one of the biggest disappointments for me in attaining, like, full adulthood, where I'm aware of more things than just my own world etc., is finding out how utterly horrible most conspiracy theories are. Like, as an adolescent even up through being a young adult, I was so blithely delighted in all these "wacky" conspiracy theories, some because they were just so transparently goofy and others because there's a certain joy in just unhinged bulging-eyed froth sometimes, and one by one every single one of them has been revealed to secretly be about Jews, except for the few that are actually about race wars etc. Like-- basically all of them!!! Argh nothing is fair game anymore. And it's not even like, oh ha ha these are about old racial prejudices that nobody-- yeahhhh it's a huge fucking bummer.
So I feel you on the hollow world story idea. Also I think I read that one????? I was a precocious reader and sometimes I was given weird old shit to read without context, and I think I read that one.
HOWEVER
My very favoritest author, Martha Wells, has as her sole foray into actual YA a story called Emilie And The Hollow World, which is about something like that, and it's so cool and is the only thing of hers that her new popularity because of Murderbot seems not to have brought back into print. Its sequel, which was about, perhaps, airships?, is the only book of hers I've never read because I didn't get it when it came out and it's not available even as an ebook anymore.

[minoanmiss]

Oh my goodness, so well said about the conspiracy theories. I am Disappoint that they are all turning out not to be amazing legends but just drab bigotry. ugh.

[dragonlady7]

> drab bigotry

Oh my gosh yes, this. Like of course the hateful part is terrible and whatnot, but it's just so-- it's so boring. It's just dull. It's life and death and incredibly high stakes but sweet lord, it is so boring and predictable. Like, being mauled to death by wild animals, or something, would be equally terrible and yet at least it would be interesting. This shit is just so goddamned tedious. And it's not even like... like there's any real variety in the bigotry, either. Not that I wish more people could be subjected to that kind of hate, but-- well, actually, if you spread it around a little more, maybe people would be more sympathetic? ... ... Probably not, but one could hope.
No, it's just. It's so deadly dull, and deadly, and dull.

[sabotabby]

I was a huge fan of the X-Files and disappointed when people like that took over the US government but then ended up being terrible.

All conspiracy theories are about the Jews except that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion wasn't even about the Jews at first. Disappointing because I don't have the power to delete anyone's bank account or shapeshift, because it I could, I damn well would.

[dagibbs]

I read The White Mountains (and the rest of the trilogy) as a kid. I remember liking them -- but I did not have as discriminating tastes then.

[sabotabby]

It's not bad for YA!

[dagibbs]

I've read some YA recently that was quite good, and not just "for YA", straight up, quite good.

[sabotabby]

Me too, but for the most part I find the entire marketing category very flatly written and condescending.

[dagibbs]

I'm not surprised at that for the category -- I would guess that the YA I end up reading is only that which is, let say, cross-over to adult.

[moon_custafer]

Hollow-Earth theories date back to the mid-19th century and seem to have been popular among various pulp writers who probably picked them up via Poe. With those antecedents I’m still kind of nervous that there’s probably some racist stuff hidden in there, given that the current crop of apparently sincere Flat Earthers eventually go down that rabbit hole, to really mash up some metaphors (Flat-Earther and Hollow-Earthers battling it out, otoh, would be comedy gold).

Was The White Mountains the beginning of the Tripod series? I never really followed the tv show, back when YTV had just started and was running a lot of 1970s British serials, but I saw enough clips from it that “capping” and the post-apocalyptic medievalism ring a bell.

[rdi]

Yeah, The White Mountains is the first of the Tripod series; the others are The City of Gold and Lead and..(had to look this up) The Pool of Fire

I read them and a lot of other John Christopher as a kid, and really enjoyed them, though I haven't looked back at any of them for a number of decades now. The Guardians was a particular favourite of mine at the time, as I recall.

[sabotabby]

There's definitely anti-Semitic variations of Hollow Earth (and one decent B-Movie, Nazis At the Centre of the Earth, which involves MechaHitler but is not as good as Iron Sky) but I don't think the primary thrust of it tends to be racist. Just very weird.

Now I want to somehow write a story where both Flat Earth and Hollow Earth are somehow true. But people would end up adopting it as their worldview and somehow making it racist.

[grimjim]

I blame the guy who started with "It was a dark and stormy night" for also publishing Vril in 1871. The Theosophists got their hands on it, and were 19th-century racist to begin with (though they had a "moon race" too), and it only got worse from there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vril

[sabotabby]

Ugggh, I think I knew that but blocked it out.

[moon_custafer]

Slightly related— there’s a Tumblr thread I’ve seen a few times to the effect that it’s rather unfair to claim Bulwer-Lytton was plumbing the depths of purple prose with that opening sentence: it sets the scene with far more economy than many Victorian writers would have deployed. I can’t disagree.

[grimjim]

I wonder if it was one of those things that became tired due to excessive imitation.

[sabotabby]

It's one of those trope codifiers mentioned in another thread, I suppose.

[grimjim]

Yeah. Fortunately not all strains of hollow earth resulted in this.

[moon_custafer]

where both Flat Earth and Hollow Earth are somehow true

Well, a Flat Earth must have another side to it, so all you need to do is drill some holes in inconspicuous places and modify the Hollow Earth premise only slightly.

[rdi]

I was thinking along similar lines. Although in that case how do the elephants hold it up?

[moon_custafer]

Contrary to popular belief, the elephants are in fact lying on their backs. What they are holding up is the sky of the Other Side.

[rdi]

So what's holding up _our_ sky? Is it Elephants all the way up?

[minoanmiss]

It's always fun to explore what TV Tropes calls a "trope codifier", an early example of tropes that othere works then picked up and ran with and stereotyped.

[moon_custafer]

Do they have a term for something that *ought* to have been a trop codifier, but it didn’t catch on like some other work from the same time period, so when you read/see it now it feels either staggeringly fresh and original in a way that the trope codifier doesn’t, and/or like looking at the alternate universe of pop culture that could have been?

(Yeah I’m talking about Lud-in-the-Mist. Which may not even have seemed all that weird and original in the 1920s – it was on a continuum with the works of James Branch Cabell, which you mostly don’t hear about now. My point is that High Fantasy ended up being dominated by Tolkien imitators instead of Mirilees imitators.) Typing this as I wait for my lunch break, not sure how much sense I’m making.

[minoanmiss]

You have described the kind of thing you mean very well, and I'm going to keep an eye out for it as I roam around TV Tropes. :)

[moon_custafer]

My one problem with TVTropes (aside from it being a black hole of interesting things, all to easy to fall into) is that they have their own name for each trope, and if you don’t know what it is, you have to wander around the related tropes, trying to figure out what they call the thing where a character keeps up their deception even when they’re alone, in situations where it makes no difference, all so that the audience won’t find out the truth too soon (I call this “Faking It for the Fourth Wall.”)

[sabotabby]

Yes!

[lapinlunaire]

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who likes to read about harmless bonkers stuff! The Hollow Earth ones never appealled to me that much, unfortunately, but it's very wholesome and I like it.

[sabotabby]

I don't know how to put it, but it's written in such a cute way? I don't know, the author is just very excited about it.

[ltmurnau]

I think you might like the trilogy.
I remember enjoying it when I was a kid, also The Guardians.
Grown-up John Christopher is good too, for example The Death of Grass and The World in Winter, two good apocalypse novels.
John Christopher was born Sam Youd, and wrote a large number of novels under nine different pseudonyms.

[sabotabby]

The first one was definitely fun enough to make me want to check out his other stuff.