Thankyou, PrettyFakers!
For the link to Jack Butler’s interview, essay, and poetry!
A fine writer and thinker, also a friend (again, thanks are due to the fine folks at PF), I find Jack never disappoints, because he’s always at pains to speak as cogently as he can. So: do go look.
…So if you’re still with me after all that…
…Then here’s more.
And the first thing you have to know about it is: that a lot of the things we call rhymes, aren’t technically rhymes at all. A rhyme goes like “moon” and “june”, not “moon” and “shoe”. That isn’t a rhyme: it’s assonance. Also, sometimes we just make words up to get to assonance. That’s the funniest angle on rhyme, sometimes you push it and push it…sometimes you offer the listener something that is almost, not quite, just skating on the thin ice of: too much to let slide. I’ve done it myself, just flat-out made words up. And not just weird portmanteaux, I’m talking actual not-words, strange chimerical Frankensteinian blendings of words, or even more illegitimate constructions that just limp across the finish line on pure consonantal rhythm, little more than zombies, doomed astronauts of words left out there with malfunctioning suits, just trying to cross from one airlock to another before they’re consumed by the proton storms of the solar wind. You can even do this sort of thing with instrumentation, if you get that drunk and that crazy. Man, let me tell you: I recently stuck the opening guitar part of “Ziggy Stardust” into the middle of a middle eight of a song, you know? Just because it flipped the usual relation of lyric to tune right on its head: the textual demand of the line created a temperature-inversion, and suddenly out popped musical allusion, and oh I’m doing it again, aren’t I?
Illegitimate fusion.
But that’s just the melodic song, again. What Del and his collaborators do is something different, and again it’s because of the different form — as Sean notes, the most futuristic mood on the album is created in “Madness” just by the juxtaposition of the sample with the confessional…and maybe there’s even something else in play there, too. Because we know that the sample comes from somewhere, but we may not be sure exactly where, and that’s what makes the sense of time come free from its moorings, until it’s itself “caught in the grip”. It’s called dislocation, and it’s never neater than when it results from something that is all location, all contextualization. In the melodic song’s near-unbreakable verse-verse-chorus structure, I work harder than I can tell you to find opportunities for just this sort of recursion. Deltron brings it off effortlessly; every time Del announces the futuristic date he is ostentatiously telling in a way I couldn’t, because he then turns around and paints in what’s missing from the declaration. Tone. Texture. If you skip over “Madness” in your CD-listening, you won’t know what it means that in the year 3030 everybody wants to be an MC…you won’t know why it is, that in the year 3030 everybody wants to be a DJ. And it’s important to know that stuff, because without it, when Del sings later on that he believes in turbulence and murder since it’s an everyday occurrence…you won’t see the literary message buried in that, half-hidden by the body of the social message lying on top of it. Which would be a shame, because science fiction’s about the here and the now — its future worlds are our world’s reflections, and the people pictured inside the mirrors are ourselves, and that can be a tough message to take in, because it’s such a cliche…it’s lost so much of its force to repetition over the years, it takes real effort to bring its meaning back on board. It’s like when we talk about spacetime, as the identity of space and time — well, it sounds like nothing until you realize the utter factuality of that union, that time and space really are the same…
And it’s the same thing here.
Back on the street, the Coke cans shine along the ground like drifts of aluminum snow…I guess we’re on Titan, or something. The headset’s like a spacesuit. Arcology-dwellers pass to and fro like stressed-out electrons across the big circuit board of downtown, the shopping district…here’s where Blade Runner and Eyes Wide Shut meet (what, you didn’t know Eyes Wide Shut was SF? Next you’ll be telling me you didn’t know it was a Christmas movie), it’s a used universe we’re living in, all this broken-down technology that keeps us moving and breathing, streaming by in statistical flows to our places of calculation. This isn’t SF, this is a reaction to SF. I’m reacting to it. I’m trying to communicate with it, decode its orbital transmissions, figure out what it’s trying to tell me. At the foot of every mall escalator, you expect to look up and see Arnie coming for you, wielding his assault weapons and his punchlines. But Kubrick had this all down years ago, you know. He was reacting, too. Secretly plotting your demise…
And I want to devise a supervirus…
We’re the mutants, we’re the underground; but we’re not the aliens. I want y’all to stay calm, once again…that’s right. It’s just internal switching, you know. That’s the advantage of rap, the switching…again, I can’t begin to tell you how hard I work at this, at getting to an end-line I can do something with, either continuing on, maybe running over the line’s musical length…or reining tight in at the edge of it, and turning the momentum sideways, showing the listener another conclusion. A hard left or a leap, that’s all I’m trying to get myself ready for with my lonesome-cowboy doggerel and “I really love you baby” trick-bag of cliches. When you write a melodic song, you have to develop a teasing relationship with cliches, you can’t go so far as to do the actual deed with them, but you have to keep them at the end of your string, you can’t let ‘em go…they’re what anchors you to the listener. But in rap, the way you play is different, and you don’t need that string. It’s all much looser, and the end-points come at you no matter what. “Alien annihilation”, it’s a remarkable line — look, Del tells you to hold up! And then he spins 180 degrees on the balls of his feet (the lamps of his mouth), and heads off. Trailblazing for you. This makes the Ziggy-part of my middle eight, where the familiar riff picks up the logical meaning from the lyrics and carries it in across the line, look pretty superfluous — and yet it’s only hip hop’s natural aptitudes that I’m trying to approximate, there. I’m trying to clone that skill it was born with. Well, why shouldn’t I try to get on board this shuttle?
It’s leaving, ain’t it?
I drop my coins in the slot, take my transfer, and walk into the rolling movie theatre.
Back over the bridge we go, roaming in the gloaming.
Flame on, baby. Don’t fight the feeling.
Oh yeah: I’ll be back.
Well, as a matter of fact…
Well…
Unlike the last one, I could kind of see that, a little bit.
But once again it’s one of these.
Okay, so one of my favourite moments in the entire original series is right out of “An Unearthly Child”…when Susan wonderingly tells her teachers that the fourth dimension is Space.
I love that. It’s a wonderful example of how SF stories, especially SF stories for kids, can hand you a bit of a science-koan and leave you to work it out for yourself. There’s even a time-honoured mechanism here: putting the cart before the horse. Warren Ellis did it in Planetary/JLA when he introduced the “loop of light” time machine — certainly a possible idea given the almighty E=mc2, but the hilarious thing about it is: what in this universe can make light go in a loop, anyway, eh? So, CART BEFORE HORSE, for sure, but it’s brilliant anyhow…it gave me that same shiver I got as a child, seeing Reed Richards explain “sub-space” by drawing a dotted line through a circle…he might as well have shoved a pencil through a tennis ball…I mean it presupposes so much, but it’s so beautifully Einsteinian: here’s what the picture looks like, now make up what it means please, attentive children…
I mean, for example: the Tardis is “dimensionally-transcendent”, right?
But another way of saying this is that the police box is really a three-dimensional door, to another locale outside of three-dimensional space. And that’s called a wormhole, folks: a spherical defect in spacetime, whose centre is a translation-point to Elsewhere. Of course wormholes are evanescent, and they don’t look like police boxes…at least not to us they don’t. But this is what it means to be a Time Lord, I suppose: you can make stable wormholes just to use them as the welcome mat to your house of super-science.
And this is what comes of putting the cart before the horse, you see?
But, hmm, did not expect to make that digression…
So anyway: Susan in the classroom. It’s an absolutely gorgeous possibilistic moment.
Why give it up?
Here’s what I might do with Doctor Who: just start from the beginning, but go in a completely different direction — a direction in which everybody gets to have a really interesting “main-ness” about their character. Susan and the man she calls her grandfather…and there’s something funny about that, there’s something wrong with him it seems…have left the home she describes, somewhat mysteriously, as “Gallifrey”.
But why?
And where is it?
And what is up with that old coot, anyway?
And that’s the show, but now here are the background details: “Gallifrey” is less a world than a condition — we are putting the “mau” back in gallimaufry, here — and it lies in the far future…or at least, as possibly Susan will one day say, “what you would call the far future”. It seems evident that it is a planet, her ellipsis notwithstanding…
…But whatever Gallifrey is, it’s ruled by the Time Lords, of whom the Doctor is one — and it seems the Doctor was being inducted into a prestigious order that the Time Lords spend all their very long lives waiting to get into, when abruptly he ran out on it and got Susan and commandeered the Tardis and took off into time and space. Eventually, you and I would probably recognize that what the Doctor was being inducted into was the Matrix, being connected to the total stored knowledge of the Time Lords…and yet this Matrix wouldn’t be very much like the one we know, just enough that the following proposition makes sense: that once having begun to join with it, the additional knowledge he received gave him the impetus to break off the process and go and escape with Susan. But he both left behind part of himself in the Matrix, and took something of the Matrix with him, and so this is Doctor Who by way of Vernor Vinge — modules of the Doctor’s personality and memory were swapped out with informational modules of the Matrix, whether purposely by him or accidentally as part of the process (which, maybe, at some point someone might refer to as “Regeneration”…which who knows why they would call it that, but let’s not make things sound too cut-and-dried, here! Maybe there’s a good reason!), and so he’s not the man he was…and a partly-amnesiac Doctor is just too interesting not to have right away, so pausing just long enough to thank Andrew for the idea I’ll now jump all over it…which is to say, he’s not quite the man Susan remembers.
Nor the man we remember, because this Doctor has an overriding purpose that we don’t understand, and perhaps neither does he: except it’s something to do with getting Susan away from Gallifrey. And I won’t say what that is, because the possibility doesn’t need collapsing: after all, why must Susan be less mysterious than the Doctor himself? The Doctor we know has been absolutely loaded with secrets and mysteries for over a quarter-century, and they’re still not all out, and people don’t seem to mind…they seem to like it, in fact, so let’s not be in such a hurry to get to boring conclusions about Rassilon or The Other, because what makes all this more interesting is that there’s nothing wrong with Susan’s memory…she’s just not telling what she knows, though she knows less than the Doctor what she knows has the advantage of being all in one piece. So, her grandfather is the only one who can pilot the Tardis, but he’s been both handicapped and augmented and generally changed-around…which makes Susan a necessary component of the show, because she is a young girl who is caring for her aged relative, at one and the same time that she is being protected by him and led by him…because as a family story, wrapped in a mystery, buried underneath science fiction, Doctor Who necessarily must enjoy multiple character viewpoints for us to identify with: Ian and Barbara in some sense stand in loco parentis to Susan in this strange situation (as do we, in a way!), and provide us with a sense of wonder at it all as well as a sense of wondering-what-to-do about it all…not to mention representing to us a certain issue of affection and forced romance that can be made much of but not necessarily too much…rather like the way it was handled between the Ninth Doctor and Rose. Which is all perfectly fine stuff, but additionally Susan is the show’s emotional centre, and her occasionally-fraught relationship with her grandfather is what carries our sympathies most powerfully…so we can switch our viewpoint-allegiance to her just as easily. As for the Doctor himself, he doesn’t need to change much from the Hartnell performance: just changing the relationship dynamics around him will be sufficient to bring in a faint suggestion of Lear, at the same time bringing a faint suggestion of the posthuman boddhisatva (or in this case: post-Gallifreyan), and of course at the same time maintaining about him all that is Who. Again borrowing from Andrew, I should say that the adventures through time and space represent an occupational therapy for him, after his episode of cognitive damage…even as he undertakes them only for Susan’s sake.
As to the general question of Tardises, the overwhelming question of just what in the hell it is that the Time Lords do all day…I would propose that the Tardises are used pretty much exclusively to bring people to Gallifrey, and never for gallivanting around the cosmos, so I think if at any point a marooned-on-Earth Doctor is desired, it can be accomplished…with the caveat that it might go down a bit differently. Possibly the Time Lords are ignorant of Susan’s existence/importance, and only want the Doctor…possibly there is something in the Doctor’s head now which ought to be in the Matrix but now isn’t, and that’s why they don’t know…you could do a whole bunch of Gallifrey-based revelations after you give it about fifteen years or so, that could be quite different from the revelations the series itself actually delivered…
And if you kept it going on that long, by all means change actors at some point, and even use the word “regeneration”…especially since that word’s been somewhat subverted or compromised, from having already been used in a different context. We just don’t know anything about these Time Lords. The Doctor’s physical regeneration may be very strange, it may be that he is growing younger. He may not actually be “him” at all, but manifestations of other Time Lords whose essences he’d stolen from the Matrix…who contributed to it the knowledge of whatever mysterious imperative it is that involves Susan in all this in the first place. It might be that. It might not be. The door’s open.
I would want to use the Mad Monk as a bit of a trickster-figure.
And that’s all I’m prepared to reveal just now: because I hope it all does seem possibilistic. In my head, this thing is writing itself on its own fairly well, even as we speak — so if somehow I’ve been lucky enough that it’s doing the same in your head, I can’t think of a good reason to get in the way of that.
Whoooo, I really did not think I would be able to come up with the slightest idea for a revamped Doctor Who! But happily, in the end…
…That seems to be exactly what I’ve come up with.
Time to open the champagne!
No, he’s not actually Tarzan, of course…I mean this.
And then this.
Hmm…so how do you update Tarzan for a new age, in such a way as to load him up with actual drama instead of just a few soap-opera elements here and there?
It’s an interesting question. And with a tip of the hat to Harvey Jerkwater, I think I’ve found my answer…though in the end I’m sure I’ll still like Andrew’s better.
…
…So the first thing you have to know, is that the word Tarzan means “crazy person”, in the language of the Kasua people of New Guinea. Except, of course, it really doesn’t: I just made that up. But what the hell, if I am trying to update Tarzan I am practically guaranteed to do something disgustingly colonial somewhere along the way, so maybe with this appropriation I have gotten it out of my system.
Well, we can hope.
You may have heard of the “Lost Volcano” of Papua New Guinea, where researchers recently discovered about fifty new bizarre species…and this probably shouldn’t be too surprising, given the unplumbed richness of that island. So high a percentage of the world’s languages, so many fascinatingly-preserved birds and plants and animals and customs, so much extraordinarily rough ground, so much territory simply unexplored, both historical and physical. It’s hard to set a Tarzan story in Africa in the 21st century without either collapsing from frustration or retiring from guilt: if we don’t know Africa well enough by now not to consider it “the dark continent”, it’s only because we’ve chosen not to know it. To blithely cling to Africa’s nineteenth-century “imaginative terrain” is probably even worse than clinging to the idea that a white person can be a better African than Africans themselves…the latter idea’s racist as hell, but it’s only passively despicable: all about shoring up a European mystique of superiority that’s never really stood all that firm to begin with. The former, on the other hand, is an active, willing refusal to accord Africa the rudimentary dignity of being a place, and the Africans the dignity of being real at all.
But New Guinea’s a different sort of imaginative terrain — the appendix of the world, long thought useless, but now recognized as the place where diversity is stored up against the day of catastrophe. For us twenty-first century types, New Guinea isn’t the locale of atavism, but the very site of the new: right over there, that’s where our science fiction is going to come from, postmodern, post-colonial, post-post-post…how to be new people, how to see new possibilities, how to do new things. Forget your old futurescape narratives of motors and metals and monies and monoliths, the old clashes of technology and tribalism…because here is where the heart is.
And thus: Tarzan.
I’ll just briefly set the stage: our heroine Jane, an evolutionary biologist by trade, very much the career scientist, is visiting the region with her zoologist husband and botanist father-in-law — her father-in-law is a very big wheel indeed, so their expedition is pretty large, and quite well-equipped: lots of high-powered experts, lots of high-tech gizmos. They are going inside the region of the Lost Volcano for ten weeks to live and work — deep into the hazardous zone where no one, whether New Guinean or Western, has been before.
But of course they can’t just go in right away. First they have to spend a couple months making day trips, scouting the region for a good base camp site, interviewing the locals (let’s make them an as-yet-unencountered group of tribesmen living very close to the crater), etc. etc., and it takes a long time because the only thing like “air support” this expedition is ever going to get is some donated satellite imaging from time to time. The existence of this unexplored ecosystem is a treasure beyond price — the only way they’re getting in there no matter what is by being just about the most sensitive, non-intrusive expedition of this kind that’s ever been mounted. That’s a lot of the reason why they’ve got such nifty high-tech equipment, in fact: to make the whole operation as “clean” as humanly possible. And I know, it sounds a bit more like The Lost World than Tarzan, but work with me here. Anyway, but all this preparatory stuff is also pretty Big Science in its own right, you understand…and since Jane speaks the language and has a lot of similar experience, her job is doing the interviews with the local people. And we’re going to put some sort of clock on everything here, too — say that after the ten weeks the heavy rains are going to come, and it’s going to make things a lot more dangerous and difficult: people who go into the crater often don’t make it back out anyway, but no one who goes in there during the monsoons is ever heard from again.
Okay?
So, tick-tock, tick-tock. Time passes, and Jane compiles a lot of data. She gets to go on just a couple of the day trips, but that’s okay because she’ll get to go on the first overnight trip when that comes along. Eventually it does, and she does…into the exotic landscape that stirs her romantic soul so profoundly. They could do some remarkable astronomy in there, even: the stars are so bright. And then of course you all know what happens next: Jane can’t sleep, and sees Tarzan, who’s come to investigate the overnight camp. She thinks she’s hallucinating, but then she sees him again later on.
Back outside the crater, she quizzes the tribesmen privately, and the story gradually comes out: they are actually not the first white people ever to come there, or to be curious about the Lost Volcano. Many years ago, a small group showed up — and what happened to them is unclear, but it appears they all went into the crater during the monsoons, and were all lost, except for one little boy. Who, miraculously, came back out alive. So the Kasua, for whatever reasons of their own they had, tried to rescue him and raise him…but the boy kept running off. He wouldn’t live with them. For years and years, just when they thought he must be dead by now, at the fringes of their firelight they would perceive an occasional shadow, listening to their talk. And sometimes they’d catch him again, and sometimes they’d think they’d saved him for good this time, but he always got away again and ran off over the lip of the volcano. And that’s why they call him Crazy Person…but Jane knows another word for him: feral child. And as Harvey informs me, feral children aren’t world-beating jungle supermen, they’re children operating at tremendous disadvantages, with tremendous cognitive and physical deficits — they don’t learn language, they’re small and weak, and they don’t generally live very long. So it seems incredible, impossible, that one could have survived into adulthood in this uttermost wild spot. Well, he’d gotten some help from the Kasua, so maybe that explains it a bit…but still, what an astonishing possibility this “Tarzan” represents!
So naturally, when the ten-week expedition gets underway, Jane has Tarzan on the brain, and she ends up meeting him. And maybe our story would be different if Jane were a psychiatrist instead of an evolutionary biologist, but she’s not — she can’t help seeing Tarzan as a functional part of his environment, though she knows this is wrong. She can’t help seeing him sympathetically instead of clinically, and scientifically instead of sympathetically, and ultimately romantically instead of scientifically, all at once. Oh, but not that sort of “romantically”…Jane is happily married, and Tarzan is a bush-man…but rather his very existence speaks to her aforementioned romantic soul in such a way that she finds herself torn over what to do about him. Thanks to his interactions with the Kasua, he can make a decent approximation of baby-talk in their language, and so they can talk, and become fascinated by one another…of course Jane knows she can’t really believe they are developing any sort of actual human bond of the type she knows, but part of her believes it nonetheless, interpreting Tarzan’s behaviour as though it were the behaviour of an ordinary human person. An ordinary human child, though in an adult human body.
An ordinary human child, who needs a…
A…
And then — you saw it coming! — something happens to trap Jane in the crater-region during the monsoon season, as the rest of her expedition is forced to escape, and she discovers that Tarzan is not like an ordinary human person, and not at all like a child. As they go deeper into the backcountry, that seems to grow more exotic with every step, this fancy starts to desert her, to be replaced by another…she starts to see Tarzan as a beast, among other beasts: wild and uncontrollable, mysterious, with his own private and unfathomable nature.
And yet he cannot be this, actually. In reality, human beings are human beings the world over, and they’re all the same: they live in groups, with language and culture to aid them in survival. They didn’t “come up” from the beast-world in some arbitrary way, so they can’t go “back” to it that way either: these are artificial, prejudicial distinctions. Tarzan is very, very strange, because he’s lived his life since childhood completely free of all the ordinary evolutionary advantages that belong to human beings…
And there’s never been a human being like that!
At least, not one that lived to see maturity.
His trademarked call…what is that, anyway?
The food he eats, and gets for Jane (unwilling to eat some of the meat he gets, she’s frequently given different kinds of plants as a substitute), how did he learn about it?
The animals in the jungle…how could he have survived them? He seems to have an extraordinarily supple sense of tactics, but he also seems…well…crazy. He bursts in on a conclave of peculiar apes with merry abandon, and doesn’t get killed…are they playing with him, or trying to kill him and failing? Or, is there a difference? He can out-obnoxious monkeys and birds, he laughs to play with dangerous reptiles, he hunts jaguars by jumping on them from tree branches, it is crazy, it’s all crazy, and suddenly in a moment it comes to Jane that the animals think he’s a crazy person too…but, what makes him that way, and what makes it successful behaviour? There’s no evolution at work here, neither past evolutionary fruits being gone back to, nor new evolutionary features being gained — that’s not how evolution works. So it must be something else…
Tarzan learns a bit of English, and in teaching him Jane also learns a portion of his mysterious self-made language, the squeaks and grunts, the bizarre vocal expressions so unlike the vocalization of animals or people, the fractured pieces of Kasua, the odd bit of English stirred in…she is getting inside his head, and it’s a very weird place. What must an acultural existence be like for a human being? Is it just an endlessly shifting gallery of stimuli? What lies beyond the fear-filled existence of the foredoomed feral child, what’s it like to be a competent feral adult? Jane begins to make the connection you have surely made already: Tarzan’s not a savage, he’s a sophisticate. His mode of existence has far more in common with that of a Western urbanite, than it does with the civilized, grounded existence of the Kasua — everything is in a constant state of flux for him, as it is with our own alienated masses. He plays with language by himself, since there’s no one else to play with — he’s made his own niche in this rainforest’s startling ecosystem, out of nothing. Not being able to evolve to fit it, he’s done something far more novel than that, he’s made it fit him, somehow…he changes the parts of it that are around him, he habitually breaks every one of its pre-existing rules, and pre-existing roles.
Tarzan survives by being an artist.
Hey, but wait a minute…
Does that actually make any sense?
Oh, shit…what in God’s name has she been eating.
He just gives her stuff, and she eats it. But he’s a unique singleton living off in an uncharted, unsurveyed wilderness! Jesus, he’s given her berries. Holy shit, he’s given her mushrooms. What in the fuck was she thinking?
How long have they even been out here? Are the rains still falling?
Curse her romantic soul, it’s going to end up killing her! This guy isn’t a treasure-trove of botanical knowledge, that’s the Kasua…!
So, long story short: yes. Jane is tripping. She’s been tripping for days and days, but now she’s peaking. Suddenly she sees Tarzan in vivid hallucination, first as a victim reeking of superhuman tragedy, a lost human with needs he can’t even acknowledge, nothing but mute hurt and pain…then, terrifyingly, he’s an infant cannibal, coming after her to eat her romantic soul, her brains, the soft parts of her body…
Jane freaks, takes off suddenly at a dead run into the jungle. Tarzan is surprised, and runs after her. To protect her?
But wouldn’t that urge be foreign to his very way of thinking?
Suddenly he is a wild beast on her trail, hunting her. He’ll kill her if he catches her, crunch her bones, slurp down her blood…she has to get away. But get away to where? Back to so-called “civilization”? But every person there is secretly a Tarzan, every person there is a singleton, negotiating their world’s capricious stimuli by practising a distant, inhuman form of art…and she’s one of them too, and she cannot even get away from herself…inside her is a Tarzan, the idea of Tarzan now coming for her, coming for her…the monster gliding deeply, coldly, under the attractive skin of her false identity…
Tarzan is now freaking a little, himself. Jane is moving fast, really fast. Too fast for the jungle. He bolts up a tree, spies her charging along. He gives his weird neither-fish-nor-fowl yell, to freeze her. It works…
…And then a jaguar comes right at her from out of the bushes.
Tripped-out Jane’s response?
She goes for it.
Faster than a blink, she does something Tarzanesque to it, something stupidly unexpected: she puts her whole arm right down its throat up to the shoulder and grabs its jaw with her other hand to hold its mouth open while she messes around down in there. The jaguar is…well, let’s say startled. Jane is toast, of course; but she’s bought herself about a quarter of a second. Maybe just an eighth.
(Oh dear, this has gone a bit of the rails, I think…whoops…)
But fortunately this is time enough for Tarzan to swing down on a vine (on a vine! What?) and kill the jaguar before it tears Jane to shreds. In the aftermath, Jane has her final hallucination. Once again, she sees Tarzan…
…But this time, she doesn’t see him as a child, as a victim, as a beast, or even as an idea. Against all expectations, she suddenly sees him, with alarming vividness, as a man.
And it is at this point that they consummate their relationship. Very new stuff, to Tarzan! As at last, the real irrevocable human connection is made, and cemented.
So, end Part One.
And then Part Two naturally goes like this: the rains end, and Jane’s husband and father-in-law return, and what with one thing and another Tarzan and Jane leave the Lost Volcano for the outside world. And here are a bunch of your major soap-opera elements, right in Part Two where they should be…but in a sense, to Tarzan it’s all one: he’s still an environmental artist, the outside world is just as full of madness to him as was the jungle, and he deals with it the same way…I hope you can picture it all as automatically as I can…but then in Part Three he and Jane return to New Guinea, to, I don’t know, thwart the evil plans of bioprospecting poachers? There’s a lot of new (old) knowledge in Tarzan’s jungle, but Tarzan himself is still the major repository of it…”how did he survive” is still a very important question that he will never be able to answer. But Jane might be able to answer it, in time, and that’s her new field of research: discovering what Tarzan knows, that he doesn’t know he knows. And it’s very fruitful research indeed, but then that’s where the danger comes from, too. The world spins on into the twenty-first century, and times change, but people don’t: the last storehouses of biodiversity, as they become more vitally important to the human race, also become focusses of wealth, power, and all that crap. Meanwhile the “archive” that Tarzan’s unmarked, uncatalogued experience represents still has Elephants’ Graveyards in it, waiting for Jane to discover them…
Oh, and I think that’s probably all I can manage for tonight. But I think there’s enough there to do more stuff later…I mean, in order to interpret Tarzan’s experience lucidly, Jane will have to spend a lot of time with the Kasua, who as previously mentioned are the only source of cultural knowledge in the region…it probably ought to be that in Part Two it’s discovered Tarzan has not only a fortune waiting for him in the outside world, but relatives…the geopolitics New Guinea is embedded in today might easily offer thrilling extrapolations for future Tarzan stories…
Uh…
Hey, just think of it as being written by Kim Stanley Robinson instead of me, okay?
Oh, this bloody thing almost killed me, and now suddenly Andrew’s got a new one up…
Curse you and your manifestoes, Andrew! I knew nothing good could come of all this!
Since you have already MEMED everybody who reads you, I don’t suppose I should say I’d like to see what RAB’s Tarzan or Doctor Who would be like…
But, y’know…I think I will, anyway. He did miss the Darkseid one due to Marc saying everything, after all…so that’s clearly his fault and he should be made to pay…
And hey…anyone ever read “Showboat World” by Jack Vance?
I wanna do some Jack Vance blogstuff pretty soon, I think.
Okay, now I’m just rambling.
