Hartmann: Recursive Review

[dime_novel_hero]

As a followup of my review of "Hartmann the Anarchist" I simply can no longer resist reviewing someone else's online review. It is so full of fail that I wonder if Cameron actually read the same book that I did.

"A late 20C anarachist [sic] satirical take on late 19C and early 20C science fiction adventure stories. As a pastiche it really doesn't work."

First off, Cameron, it is an actual 19th Century science fiction adventure story. Written in 1892! The reason it doesn't work as a pastiche is because it isn't. Well, mostly. It certainly shares some elements with Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" (1870) and moreso with "Robur the Conquerer" (1886) but it's political underpinnings are certainly not a rehash of those stories, being much more like H.G. Wells stories but a decade earlier.

"It reads like an overlong injoke for people who don't really know the subject they are attempting a piss-take on."

OK, now this is really funny. Cameron is trying to stomp all over the author for not knowing the subject when he didn't realize that that this was a period novel.

The painfully bad "lost history "of the author and manuscript fails to set up the joke. There are continuous anarchronisms [sic] that prevent you from ever fully slipping into the genre and believing you are reading a contemporary of Conan-Doyle, Verne and HG Wells. The wood block illustrations are "out of place" and distract rather than add to the story telling.

The "lost history" that I think Cameron has confused himself with is that the story is set in 1920 but without the First World War having happened. But, other than that, I am at a bit of a loss as to what anachronisms he sees that destroys the illusion that the author is a contemporary of Conan-Doyle, Verne and Wells. Anachronisms are modern items, events, technology and language that is out of place in the past. Aside from the aeronef, which I found to be not far removed from the science of the time in the same way that Verne predicted the technology of the Nautilus based on the submarine technology of the time, everything else was firmly set within the 1890s time frame in which the story was written. The politics. The language. All very Victorian. Again, I think Cameron fooled himself with the 1920 date.

And the illustrations! They only seem out of place and distracting because you grew up in the second half of the 20th Century after publishers had abandoned the use of illustrations as part of the narrative of novels. Before that, and especially before the tuning of the Century, novels and serialized stories in magazine all had illustrations. Have you seen the Granada "Sherlock Holmes" television series with Jeremy Brett? If you watch it closely and then pick up some period reprints of Arthur Conan-Doyle, you will see where they stage the illustrations on film. Those sort of moments used to be on facing pages but with the advent of motion pictures somehow seemed redundant and faded away. Only recently with the influence of graphic novels has illustrated fiction begun to return. (Look at John Westerfeld's "Levaithan" with illustrations by Keith Thompson

So, if this were a pastiche, you would really have to have illustrations to reinforce the illusion.

I could see it working a series of snippets in Viz comic, where minimal subject matter knowledge and "factoids" would make the joke appropriate to the audience. However to go through with an entire book I would have expected more effort rather than a half-assed effort.

Is Cameron a troll? Is he just writing a review that is completely ignorant of the context and content just to get a rise out of someone like me? I don't think so. I've read a lot of his online reviews, paying particular attention to those that I have read also and he doesn't exhibit any trollish tenancies. I think he genuinely had no idea that this was published in 1892, perhaps having looked at the 21st Century reprinting date and skipping over the "About the Author" section or not looking at the back cover. A bit like the Amazon review of "Boilerplate" by J.Stonebreaker who failed to realize that the turn of the century mechanical man narrative was a work of fiction because at no point on the cover or inside do the authors explicitly say so. (Except maybe in the "About the Authors" section on the very last page that says they write science fiction and comic books. Too subtle, apparently.)

Interesting how a tiny fragment of information can be so vitally important to critical analysis. Had Cameron known that "Hartmann" was an actual period book I have no doubt he would have had a completely different analysis of what he had just read.

I do want to give Cameron some credit, though. His comment about Viz has me thinking of "Hartman the Anarchist" in manga or anime terms. Remember those long military coats with unnaturally high collars that all the captains seem to wear? The steely eyed gaze? The silent brooding? Captain Harlock. Nemo in "Nadia: Secret of Blue Water". Captain Global from "Macross". Silvana captain Alex Row from "Last Exile". The anarchist Hartmann seems tailor-made for such a treatment.