The Mutter Museum [Review]

The Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia

by Gretchen Worden Blast Books, 2002

It’s getting close to Halloween, and thus the time for creepy thrills.

You can find them at the Mutter Museum in the city of Philadelphia. The Mutter Museum was the brainchild of physician and educator Dr. Thomas Mutter. He left money in his will for its founding in order to share his extensive collection of artwork with other medical practitioners. Over the years the College of Physicians, the medical society that maintained it, continued to add, amassing in time an astounding collection of the gross and phenomenal: wax anatomy mannequins, early photographs of diseases and tumors, shrunken heads, and specimens of everything from human skulls to fetuses. All are arranged and displayed in the manner of a Victorian “Cabinet of Curiosities,” the forerunner of today’s natural history museums. For many years it was closed to the general public and visits were accepted only by special request. But curator Gretchen Worden changed all that. She brought the museum into the public sphere in the 1990s, opening it up to general admission and turning it into a more highbrow version of the Jim Rose Circus, which was also popular at the time.

This book was commissioned to highlight the museum’s collections. It’s a coffee table style publication in which photographers were invited to chronicle the displays each in their own style. They make the grotesque seem, if not exactly beautiful, aesthetic.

The foreword gives the history of the museum’s founding and the stories behind some of its star exhibits, like Chang and Eng’s conjoined liver. It’s worthwhile to read for that alone. My favorite pictures tended to be the most conventional, though I have a weakness for gelatin prints. My only criticism is that William Wegman’s Weirmaraner dogs, looking out dolefully between human bones, sort of broke the spell. The museum is a place of the dead, and though humor and social commentary can certainly be read into the history of medicine presented the decades, I’m not sure living creatures belong there.

If you can’t visit the museum in person, pay a visit to the Mutter website, where you can find rotating online exhibits and videos as well as an online gift shop where you can buy lovable stuffed versions of E. Coli, Malaria, and the HPV virus. .

Wolfmistress

Speak only when you are spoken to. Excuse me, howled to.

 

Worldbuilding Wednesday 10/10/18: Elements

Unique and rare elements are a staple of worldbuilding when writing SF. Star Trek has its dilithium, Black Panther’s Wakanda vibranium, and the moon of Pandora, unobtainium. These elements serve as a means to explain a technology that does not exist, or serve as a McGuffin for conflict.

Looking for a new element? Here’s a randomgen list.

 

Imaginary Elements

Urabium

Lallpium

Hamakine

Dhamallium

Penuborus

Nisessium

Nikidine

Chelesium

 

 Denforine

Ochrite

Ytezine

Adhgretine

Arlancite

Methiphorus

Chliforanate

Linzine

 Ossiforum

Olgretite

Sephite

Sugion

Nevon

Ruzhite

Penium

Prospon

My Serpent Heart

It’s alive and hisses with passion.

The Shadow Glass [Review]

The Shadow Glass

by Aly Fell
Dark Horse Books, 2017

 

The Shadow Glass is filled with some wonderful artwork. The first page shows a view from the Tower of London overlooking a lovely harbor by the river Thames, a red and blue pennant flying, as a traveler named Thomas Hughes arrives. In night-muted colors an occult ritual then takes place at the home of John Dee, an actual historic figure of the time, with the Shadow Glass, a polished black mirror Hughes stole from pre-Columbian Mexico. The spell goes wrong, however, and the unwilling female subject sprouts tentacles. It’s a great beginning.

Unfortunately, the rest of the story left me wanting. I picked up the book because of the strength of the cover, picturing the adventures of a cross-dressing female swordsman in Elizabethan England. I thought it was a clever comment on the practice of Shakespearean theater of having female parts played in drag by male actors… no self-respecting woman would own up to being an actress back then, as it was synonymous with being a prostitute. I expected this gender aspect to work into the story somehow, assuming the writer and artist, Aly Fell, was a woman. Well, it didn’t; Aly Fell was a man, and the cross-dressing served no purpose or metaphor that I could see, save that the artist liked drawing young, hot women in doublets and hose.

I realize I’m being harsh on the guy; after all, this is a person I don’t know. But a lot of the story seemed to be generated from that aspect. It moved along like a storyboard for a movie production, rather than a comic where anything and everything is possible. Rosalind, the girl on the cover, is set up to be the protagonist of the story, yet she isn’t, really – she’s jerked around too much by circumstance, a puppet of those around her. She has no free will; the story just carries her along to her fate. She’s the daughter of Adam Larkspur, an old friend of Thomas Hughes, and her mother, it is revealed, is the woman possessed in the ritual of the chapter before. At 18 she learns that Thomas Hughes is her true father and goes to the home of John Dee to confront him, she being a student of his. While she’s there Hughes arrives as well and Rosalind secretly witnesses a second ritual with the mirror where an angelic being known as Madimi is summoned. Afterwards, she steals the mirror on Madimi’s urging. A hot angel-and-girl makeout session follows where it’s implied Rosalind has been sexually awoken. And the angel is revealed to be… a demoness!

All right so far. I expected the story to then offer some juicy twist, like Madimi and Rosalind run off together to create havoc at Queen Elizabeth’s court, while the men try to stuff the genie back in its bottle. But, no. Hughes is revealed as the villain and Rosalind is manipulated by both by him and Madimi. Both she and Hughes die while Madimi sails off into the sunset having possessed Rosalind’s body. It’s a fairly tropish ending, and the totally expected ending given that we are dealing with a female demon that possesses human females. Life’s a bitch and then you die. What was the purpose of reading the story again?

The Shadow Glass, by Aly Fell

History of the Shadow Glass

I suppose part of the problem is the story didn’t know what it wanted to be… supernatural horror, an adventure tale with a swashbuckling young female, or a historical could-have-been. It can be all three, of course, but ideally one element should have been raised over the others and given it some direction. I get the feeling that the author really wanted to write about John Dee and medium Edward Kelley, but got distracted by the girlflesh. Or a sexual splatter tale, but stuck in too much sedate conversation about fate and alchemy. I think it would have worked best as adventure, but then the protagonist would have to live. As it was, it was just a bunch of things that happened, tepid and without any deeper resonance.

Harping as a feminist here, I am really tired of seeing the virgin/whore, angel/demon dichotomy play out. It’s old and tired and lowbrow. Why does Madimi have to be one or the other? Why couldn’t she be her own being?  Where are her motivations?

In the end I couldn’t root for any of the characters and the story was shallow. The art is beautiful, though.

 

Worldbuilding Wednesday 10/3/18: Gaulish Tribes

If you’re from Western Europe, you will know who these characters are.

If you aren’t, know that they are Asterix the plucky Gaul, his big pal Obelix, and their pet dog Dogmatix, creations of French comic writer and artist René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. They are the equivalent of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in France. Asterix and Obelix lived in the time of Julius Caesar, and many of their adventures concern outwitting the Roman leader and his troops. (They also had run-ins with Cleopatra.) They even have their own theme park.

If you need an imaginary Gaulish tribe for worldbuilding purposes, here’s a few randomgen ones.

 

Imaginary Gaulish Tribes

Villsunians

Lugeuni

Marsundaces

Mistegii

Merlchuni

Hanadae

Misbretchians

Siborgii

Vyrutii

Lisanoi

Vistethians

 Rhadithantes

Tellvaces

Saltorgii

Zimendae

Barbrani

Gadhians

Lanisci

Rhonbians

Alsgii

Ulthae

Saltarenes

 

Hermetech
[Reading Challenge 2018]

Hermetech

by Storm Constantine
Headline Book Publishing PLC, 1991

[Challenge # 1: A book that’s been on your TBR (to be read) list for over a year.]

British fantasist Storm Constantine is an acquired taste. Hermetech, published in 1991, is the one novel of hers I kept trying to start, and kept putting off. It’s one of her earlier works and plays with some of the same themes as her earlier Wraeththru trilogy and The Monstrous Regiment… sexual awakening/mutilation, the power of belief, a charismatic leader who is a little mad, and the need of the young and inexperienced to find their place among more worldly and sophisticated companions.

But boy, did it start off unpromisingly. The time is many centuries in the future and the Earth has been ravaged by environmental disasters. Most people live in domed cities with robot and AI servants. There’s a huge infodump off the bat about Naturotech, a “neo-pagan” group and its political arm the Tech-Greens, and an eccentric millionaire who created replicas of Stonehenge monuments complete with laser light shows and robot caretakers. Aimless, tech-savvy hippies roam the wastelands of this world like Burning Man refugees. One such group meets a teenage girl, Ari Famber, who has been genetically engineered by her scientist father to manifest “The Goddess” whenever she has sex. The group, headed by Leila Saatchi, Ari’s father’s ex-lover, asks Ari to join them and they journey to the city of Arkady where she is to lose her virginity and learn how to control her powers.

The concept was more science fantasy than science fiction, and hard to take seriously. In fact, SF author Bruce Sterling writes in a blurb that the author “… ignores every bourgeois rule of fiction” and that assessment is correct. Hermetech pushes buttons for both readers and writers.

Most of the book was travelogue. Leila’s band of misfits journey in two huge Humvee-type vehicles, manifesting petty rivalries and love triangles among themselves on the way. It’s a setting similar to the Mad Max-like Wraeththru world, but described in greater depth. The language borders on overripe, but it’s always entertaining, and there’s a well-worded psychological nugget of wisdom on practically every page. The cast of characters is large and the POV switches constantly, often in mid-page. It was jarring, but I was soon won over by the elegance of Constantine’s prose and the charm of her characters, who have high ideals but whose delusions are all too human. I’ve known people exactly like them. The book still  feels contemporary, like it could have been written today. Only the addition of Smartphones would be needed to make it into a still-plausible depiction of the future.

That said, a lot of the book was plain silly. The scientific geniuses are never shown doing anything with actual science, for example… they schmooze, try to one-up each other, and do something vague with brainwaves and laptops. The plot is all over the place, some elements receiving a buildup but panning out to nothing, while others depended on unlikely coincidences. The book was far too long for what actually happens in it, yet, enjoyable for that. It was a tale of human relationships – a comedy of manners almost.

The plot has some classic Constantine elements in it which added to my enjoyment. Like Zambia Crevecoeur, the Goth boy prostitute turned artificially hermaphrodite. The character serves as window dressing in the story and I wonder if, in an earlier version, he was to serve as Ari’s first lover instead of the teen boy who eventually does. He is slashy fun to read about, serving as a more mature Wraeththru figure: the beautiful, damaged male who descends into Gothic pain and madness as he’s transformed into a SHe, the pronoun the author chooses to give him. It’s a female who makes him over through surgery: Jahsaxa Penumbra, a sex club owner. Her thoughts on this creature are exactly why I love Constantine’s writing: it’s very rare that female rumination on androgynous male beauty is depicted so lovingly and unabashedly.

And what was it about Zambia Crevecoeur, archetypical street-urchin, cur-tempered to the end, that was so fascinating, so compelling for arch-madam, fantasy-spinner Jahsaxa Penumbra? A quality. She had simply defined it as that. The ache to touch, to sample, to receive any attention at his hands, so that even positive rejection would be a pleasure…it was for his face, his angles of flesh, his passage through space and time – a dance of movement. Zambia Crevecoeur, Jahsaxa suspected, did not naturally belong upon the street and doubtless had originally come from somewhere quite different. She knew many people came to lose themselves in Sector 23, but she suspected Zambia Crevecoeur had, in fact, found himself there. She also knew he could turn his attractiveness on and off at will, thus being able to hide effectively when it suited him. At present, it was most definitely turned off, turned inwards. She recognized the body language of self-loathing. Something would have to be done about that. The dog in him must be expelled. He must become cat: pampered, svelte, spoiled, confidant of his own unique beauty. It would be a pleasure to teach him that.

The excerpt gives an idea of the elegant decadence of the novel’s tone, and perhaps of the author, when faced with the unobtainable magic of a Goth club denizen in full costume in his natural environment.

Zambia becomes the lover of Tammuz Malamute, one of the scientific geniuses of the story and, as it turns out, Ari’s father. This subplot, as with some others, could have been cut for a leaner novel, or better yet, Zambia graced with a story of hir’s own.

Other superfluous characters were downright annoying, like Reynard Lennon, Jahsaxa’s man-at-arms who enters the story in its last quarter, and leaves it abruptly, and a sewer-dwelling oracle that makes one or two pronouncements to no effect. Other characters could have been fleshed out more, like Nathan, the teen boy who is chosen to deflower Ari and activate her sex powers. Leila’s group picks him up casually along the way to the city two-thirds through the book and he is barely developed as a character. The plot could have been streamlined into a more cohesive book dealing with Ari’s coming of age; it might have even made a wonderful YA dystopian novel, if the very adult sexual travails of its characters were excised.

The novel’s ending was also something of a cheat, though not unexpected.  It ended the same way as each book in the Wraeththru trilogy did and The Monstrous Regiment… with a magical ritual turned battle that neutralizes the villains in a deus ex machina blowout and leaves the main characters to pick up the pieces. We never get to find out if Ari’s powers are enough to heal the ravaged Earth as was hinted at, or who or what is now a danger to her. We never got a sequel. But I can’t complain too much, as with Constantine the journey is pretty much the destination.

 

 

Throat

 


I’m trapped in an old anatomy textbook with my throat cut open. Help?

The Lady and the Dragon, Part V

Women-as-dragon, as a concept, has been around since ancient times. In Greek myth creatures like Scylla, Echidna, and Medusa had monstrous or dragon-like aspects, as did Grendel’s mom from Beowulf. Norse myth spoke of the dragon Nidhogg that gnawed at the roots of the World Tree Yggdrasil. And of course, there’s Lilith and Tanit/Inanana/Ishtar. They have over time gone from being creatures of power to being cursed and outcast.

In Western fantasy literature fairy tales formed the bulk of dragon transformations up until this century. One of the most typical is the ballad The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh. An evil Queen, jealous of the beauty of her stepdaughter Margaret, turns her into a dragon. When her brother Childe Wynd returns from overseas, Margaret tells him that to break the spell, he must kiss her loathsome form. Unhesitatingly, he does so, and she turns back into a human. Together, they overthrow the Queen.

This is an Arthur Rackham illustration I remember well from a book of fairy tales I had as a child. Arthur Rackham can be thought of as the inspiration for Brian Froud. I think he intended this dragon-serpent to look repulsive, but she’s actually pretty cute with her nose in the air.

In this pic the Lady Margaret is emerging from the skin of the worm, or wyrm, in a manner similar to St. Margaret who may be her inspiration. But unlike St. Margaret, she is saved by the dedication of a man and not God. Actually, it’s more than dedication. It’s a willingness to face the dark and unpleasant things in life.

A dragon masquerade in the 1910s.

In the 1960s Disney animated cartoon Sleeping Beauty the villainess Maleficent makes a powerful inspirational turn when she transforms into a dragon to thwart Prince Phillip. I think it’s the first time “Hell,” that most minor of cuss words, was uttered in a children’s movie.

What this says as a myth about gender relations is interesting. Aurora and Maleficent can be argued to be two sides of the same woman. The pretty, feminine, submissive Aurora sleeps; the active, evil, powerful Maleficent guards her and prevents her from waking. When the Prince comes, Maleficent pours all her wrath into fending him off. Yet in the end she is defeated, and Aurora woken with a kiss, and taken away into traditional married life. It can be read as an indictment of women’s’ lives in the 1960s, where they were expected to give up their autonomy and power to be traditional wedded wives. But perhaps it can also be read as a sexual awakening, where a woman’s fear must be defeated for sexual unity and enjoyment to take place. The movie was made in 1959, on the cusp of the 1960s and its social changes. It seems to predict the battle of the sexes. If Prince Phillip symbolized traditional roles, he ultimatelywon the battle but lost the war.

In Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Tombs of Atuan there’s a similar situation, described by the author herself as “puberty” where Tenar has the power to kill and defeat Ged, yet restrains from it because of her pity and fascination. She gives him water and the directions to get out of the labyrinth, and he later emerges to be the cause of an earthquake that collapses much of Tenar’s old home and whisks her away to become “The White Lady” in the inner archipelago, a traditional patriarchy where she is to be powerless, yet exalted, in a fine silk gown. Was I the only one who felt let down by this ending?

Over the decades Maleficent has gradually become the apex Disney villainess and something of a role model for many modern women for her evil glamour and ruthlessness. She is so popular she even recieved a retcon in the 2014 movie Maleficent, with Angelina Jolie in the title role. Disappointingly, it’s her henchman that turns into a dragon, not Maleficent herself, but she does have a pair of horns and hooked, dragonlike wings.

Dragon women also received a strong boost from the 1984 American TV show V, which had the Earth conquered by a race of reptile people who masqueraded as benevolent human overlords. Two of the most prominent were Diana (Jane Badler) and Lydia (June Chadwick), commanders of the invading “Visitor” forces. Described as chaotic evil and lawful evil, respectably, they paraded around in form-fitting uniforms and did naughty things like eating live mice. The show was a turning point in SF. Up to that point, women had not been portrayed as leaders in SF worlds; even Star Trek: The Next Generation, for all its fanfare and emphasis on diversity and equality, still had male captains. The two powerful lizard women inspired a lot of frenzied wish fulfillment for girls of that era.

TV series V, 1984, Diana and Lydia

Behold the awesome, futuristic plywood console for advanced spaceship navigation.

It seems the rock band KISS was an influence on the costume designers of the show. In the photo at the console Diana’s uniform bears a distinct resemblance to Ace Frehley’s Space Ace getup, and in one episode the ladies even don a variant of his facepaint (above, left.) Tragically, the full-blown lizard prosthetics were rarely shown, and then only in pieces (above, right.)

In the years since V, other Dragon girls have cropped up in unlikely areas. In the comic world, for example, there is a zaftig character called She-Dragon, who seems like a She-Hulk knockoff.

With the rise of the internet, it became easier than ever for SFF artists to scan and share their work, and fans to share artwork and fiction too, and their fantasies, and find connection with other fans. That’s how Furries founded a subculture. Furries are folks interested in humanoid and anthropomorphic animal characters as creators of artwork, fans, or roleplayers. Deviant Art, founded in 2000, became a major online site for Furry connection and artistic critique. The most popular Furries have traditionally been the glamourous ones like big cats and wolves, but as with fanfic writers, artists continually push the barriers of what is possible, and thus, Dragon girls were born… sexy, dangerous, intriguing creatures of fantasy.

V Save Alien Lover, by-vladcorail

So we have come full circle over thousands of years. Dragon September is over. It’s been fun!

 

 

The Lady and the Dragon, Part IV

Portrayals of women with dragons continued to rise throughout the 1970s, boosted by the rising genre of adult comics, forerunners to today’s graphic novels.  The French magazine Metal Hurlant (Howling Metal) showcased many of these new artists like Caza, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Moebius, who later went on to design book covers and movie and TV production design. Two years later an American version was licensed and renamed Heavy Metal. Adult comics, in the Metal magazine family, meant more artistic sophistication as well as more gore, sex, nudity, and a kind of dumb, counterculture cynicism. A common subject matter for the American cover was an over endowed woman posing with or riding some fantastic beast.

Let’s be frank, “adult” in this context meant plenty of female objectification as well (The editors of America’s National Lampoon magazine were the ones who shipped Heavy Metal over the Atlantic.) Yet it also showed women as singular, powerful warriors. Perhaps male titillation for domination fantasies?

Taarna the Warrior by Chris Achilleos

Artwork by Chris Achilleos, 1980. Very early in his career.

This Heavy Metal image, adapted later for promo campaign for the animated movie of the same name, by artist Chris Achilleos shows the popular character Taarna on her dragon, which is a pterosaur-like creature originally created by Moebius. It’s a pose that harkens back to the hippie black light poster I posted earlier, but this time the woman wields a sword and wears leather armor, not flowing robes. She’s out for business. In the movie this image advertises, she doesn’t even speak. She’s a solitary avenger, unlike Pern’s Lessa who is embedded within a social matrix of dragonriders. Though a leader and organizer, Lessa was not a fighter, and she became who she was only by virtue of being bonded to a fertile female dragon, Ramoth. Taarna exists by herself. I can’t help but feel this speaks to the rising status of women in the seventies.

Luis Royo’s version of Taarna, who is posing somewhat lacklusterly. Royo also did artwork for Heavy Metal, as did many SFF and comics artists like William Stout, Jim Burns, Chris Achilleos, Angus McKie, Sanjulian, Greg Hildebrandt and Charles Burns.

The dragon-riding female warrior had entered the 1980s with a bang, and she was later followed in the mid-1980s by Kitiara and her Blue Dragon, Skie. Kitiara was a character in the Dragonlance series of novels written by Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman, the first books carrying the TSR novel imprint using AD&D themes and monsters. The books were generated from a massive roleplaying session of the Dragonlance gaming modules, which author Tracy Hickman had developed together with his wife Laura Hickman. The purpose of the Dragonlance modules was to highlight the ten dragon types as the core monsters of the game, which TSR felt the game was moving away from.

Kitiara and Skie

Kiriara, Skie, and Kender Tasslehoff Burrfoot. Note that Skie does not conform to Blue dragon canon appearance in this early version from the mid-1980s, which also features, as was common in the artwork of the time, an aerobics-inspired sweatband for Kit’s head. She does not look pleased about it.

Kitiara was a human who was the childhood friend, and sweetheart, of Tanis, the half-elf hero and perhaps main character of the books.  The passionate yet unprincipled daughter of a mercenary, she rose through the ranks to became an evil-aligned dragon Highlord, riding a Blue Dragon (second only to the Red in the AD&D universe) named Skie. One of the original series’ highlights was her seducing Tanis in enemy territory near the huge, churning whirlpool known as the Blood Sea.

Kitiara has an anger management problem

Kitiara was the only female dragon Highlord in the books. Though evil by her company, her most heinous acts were against Laurana, her rival for Tanis’s affections. As such she served as the typically jealous ex-girlfriend, a trope that was problematic for me. But then, the books are not known for being high literature, or even good examples of fantasy literature. They were very popular however.

At the end of the series and its many sequels, it was revealed that Kitiara was yanked down into Hell by Lord Soth, a rather ignoble end for such a strong female character. I can’t help feel that authorially it was a kind of punishment for a woman reaching beyond her station. The other notable female characters in Dragonlance, in contrast, did not ride dragons, although one WAS a dragon. But that’s different.