
Imperator Furiosa, you are the only one who understands me.
Current totals are $1,545/$2,000–which gets me to page 309 or the end of Chapter 21. If we can raise $455 more, then we can start working towards this awesome stretch goal. And I’ll have to read all of Theodore Beale’s Eternal Warriors™: The War in Heaven™.
For every $100 over @eilatan's goal, I'll record a passage like this as phone sex. pic.twitter.com/7qE2X9EW4i #readingVD http://t.co/pNzpfaMEEH
— Mary Robinette Kowal (@MaryRobinette) June 18, 2015
#readingVD It is time. I am going in. Chapters 7 and 8 starting…now.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
Chapter 7: Evil Counsel
#readingVD Chapter 7: Evil Counsel, another epigraph from Isaiah.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD Kaym praises Chris for the many who fell before his sword. No, not THAT sword. The one that's on fire.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD Actual fighting is way fiercer and out of control than it is in war movies. That's because it's scripted, manchild.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD two angels have sacrificed themselves! They went out in a blaaaaaze of glory, like "a thousand angry suns."
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD Ok, so apparently Baal Chanon is not the same entity as Lucifer, a fact that the text was not clear on until Ch. 7.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD also, this is more telling instead of showing–the battle is over and Chris is remembering how RAD it was.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD "Christopher warmed to Kaym's praise. 'I've played a ton of war games, but I'd never been in a real battle. +
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD …I'm just glad I didn't blow it.'" WHAT ARE YOU GLAD YOU DIDN'T BLOW, CHRIS? WHAT.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD Chris apparently is afflicted with battle lust. You're welcome.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD Kaym is cranky. He is also wearing black plate armor: "encased bulging shoulders the size of boulders".
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD I am starting to wonder if this thing was actually edited.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD also I am pretending this is Kaym's theme music. https://t.co/VgOJadSrXI
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD Yes, let yourself be distracted by how awesome Kaym's outfit is instead of worrying about what the Princes plans for you are.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD also, Chris thinks Kaym's outfit would make an AWESOME Halloween costume.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD Now Baal Chanan is being described & he basically looks like Diablo. D1 was out in 96, so not impossible. pic.twitter.com/FNlgpwcoWB
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD wait–it appears that the battle did NOT go as well as implied on earlier pages, Baal Chanam is chewing everyone out.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD This is like a meeting where the manager wants to know why the numbers weren't hit and the minions are scrambling.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD I can't wait until these demons have to fill out their expense reports. Oh, the whining.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD so apparently the Fallen suffered a lot of losses & Kaym just lied to Baal Chanam about how many angels are waiting for them?
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 17, 2015
#readingVD But wait! Chris will come up with a winning strategy! By using his extensive history of playing WARHAMMER.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD in case any of you were doubting that Chris is using Warhammer strategy for this battle, I give you this. pic.twitter.com/aUk9pIBTjf
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD And the Fallen are all SNEERY but when they learn he's the one who got them into Heaven, they respect him.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD toxic entitled teenage masculinity. Poison.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD oh, but wait! Chris is telling the Fallen that the strategy is from Caesar, not Warhammer.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD because even HE knows how sad that is.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Oh, look. Chris is feeling around inside his robes to make sure the key is still there. It is.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Chris is going to use the key to, ah, open another gate.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Baal Chanam isn't HAPPY at this cunning plan but can't see that they have another choice.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD because among all the fallen, they have no one but Chris to come up with the strategy.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD so the whole point of Kaym taking Chris to meet Baal Chanam, though, was to get him under Baal Chanam's 'protection'.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD which Baal Chanam says he can have if Chris's strategy works. …and end of Chapter 7. In which NOTHING HAPPENED.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
So, yeah. Pretty much nothing happened in that chapter except Kaym lied to his boss about the forecast and Christopher used his extensive Warhammer experience to devise a strategy for a bunch of demons. Christopher also admired Kaym’s armor and rummaged in his robes for his key.
I am trying to understand Beale’s choice to completely skip writing about the battle. There’s no narrative tension in this book at all–we all know how it’s going to end, at some point Chris is going to realize the error of his ways blah blah blah so why don’t we at least get some awesome fight scenes?
As I said in one of my tweets: I am starting to wonder if this thing was edited or not. Because I’m no great shakes at editing fiction, but even I can see glaring flaws in the book. Was Pocket hoping to capitalize on what they hoped would be a religious fantasy trend? Were they hoping to get people who’d read Left Behind to read these? I don’t know.
Then there’s the fact that a lot of this chapter sounds like a scene from Office Space except with fallen angels.
Chapter 8: Breath of the Cherub
The epigraph here is in Latin: Vere magnum habere fragilitatum hominus securitatum dei, attributed to Seneca in Bacon’s “Of Adversity”. I will note that when I googled this, I did not find anything with this spelling and google tried to correct the spelling for me. I don’t read Latin, but I’m willing to bet that Francis Bacon spelled the words right.
#readingVD Okay. Chapter 8: Breath of the Cherub. Epigraph from Seneca, in Latin. I note that dei is spelled correctly.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Oh, now we get a fight sequence. FINALLY.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD It's not a good one, though. Also when you stab angels with fiery swords they just sorta go *poof*.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Kaym just transformed his arms into crablike pincers and pinched an Archangel to *poof*.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Kaym is now urging Chris to change forms, Chris doesn't know how! But Kaym tells him he has the POWER INSIDE HIM.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Chris is trying to feel the spark inside himself. "It was there, warm and pulsing, and he could sense it was trying to expand."
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD #sobbing pic.twitter.com/yEfHzJ3vaM
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD And Chris transforms into a….wait for it….not a horse, but a. UNICORN.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Chris is a UNICORN. Every time I think we've reached peak ridiculous, we go past it.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Also, I wonder if Teddy paid Games Workshop for the right to keep mentioning Warhammer over and over and over again.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Chris has stabbed an angel with his horn. I guess that angel wasn't a virgin?
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD "Although the first transformation was tough, the second was much easier, and the pain & itching disappeared almost immediately."
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD It sounds like Chris has a rash that he got some antibiotic ointment for or something.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD As Kaym and Chris try to make their escape by air, WEATHER HAPPENS.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Chris worries that he doesn't have a helmet to protect him from the hail. Couldn't he, like, shapeshift himself one?
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD And a lighting bolt incinerates an angel–not sure if it's one of the Fallen or not. The text is non-specific on that.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Also, apparently Heaven doesn't normally have weather.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD so apparently a Cherub is after them & they can't fight one of those in the air. Also Chris is a crap flyer.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD They land and head for a giant building in the shape of a lion's head. Also the streets are gold.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD because there's not a single cliche that Beale wants to miss here.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD But wait! They can't make the lion-building! So they must fight the Cherub on the street!
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD The Cherub has six wings, a peaceful face, blah blah blah. Kaym sasses him.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD "You know we weren't exiled, we left of our own accord."
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD I believe that's the equivalent of "You can't fire me, I quit!"
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Kaym holds Chris's hand AGAIN but in order to drain power this time, not give him power.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD oh man, the Cherub is PISSED at Kaym for taking power from Chris like that and calls him names.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD "Cursed one! I name you demon, destroyer, denied!"
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Oooh! the Cherub has lost its temper at Kaym's nonsense and its middle wings have changed into arms holding swords!
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Chris tries to help Kaym, who is dueling the Cherub, but his sword just bounces off the Cherub's wings.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Um. So Chris gets knocked down and so does Kaym, just a few cubits from Chris. The narrator is tight 3rd person on Chris.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Chris doesn't go to church or read the Bible. How would he know something was a "few cubits"?
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD More fumbling in the robes for the little key! It's detachable! pic.twitter.com/VqICEe812c
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
(musical interlude, not worksafe)
#readingVD Kaym asks Chris how he knew to throw the key/spear and he basically says, eh, that was all I had to throw.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD And Chris points out five runes on it and hands the key to Kaym and it BURNS HIM.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD Now Kaym transforms himself into the very vision of an unsullied angel, but refers to himself as a demon. This confuses Chris.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
#readingVD They're off to open the next gate–while Chris ponders Kaym's careless words. And that's it for chapter 8.
— Imperator Nataliosa (@eilatan) June 18, 2015
So there was some fighting here, but not a lot. The big fight between Kaym and the Cherub basically involved the Cherub blowing at Kaym and Christopher and the redshirts with them and Kaym holding up an invisible shield to protect them.
And the way these last two chapters were written were really confusing–Beale uses “angels” to refer to both fallen and unfallen angels, so it’s hard to follow the action and who was stabbing whom. It turns out that Baal Chanam is a different fallen angel than Lucifer is–I’ve done some cursory googling but can’t find out specifically which fallen angel/demon/false idol he’s supposed to be and I can’t figure it out. I would say just Baal, but Beale is essentially using it as a title (which is not incorrect).
Kaym swears by Dante’s Seven Hells at one point and well. Well. There are NINE circles of hell according to Dante. NINE. Which two have you decided don’t count, Beale? This is really really basic shit, even people who haven’t read Dante know that there are nine. You fail at basic research.
And I don’t even know if I want to talk about the fact that Christopher turns into a unicorn. A unicorn.
This book is just. I don’t know if I can really properly put into words how lifeless the prose is. I don’t care about any of the characters, the plot is predictable and there is no sense of urgency in the narrative at all. All this completely unexpected supernatural stuff is happening and the text doesn’t convey the strangeness or the sensawunda aspect of the setting or characters at all–or, rather, it tries to through Christopher’s reactions, but is wholly ineffectual. Christopher comes across as completely amoral: you’d think the fact that he’s killing angels would cause him some pause, but it doesn’t. He is taking lives and those lives are meaningless and their ends are strangely non-bloody (a couple folks on Twitter pointed out that the angels poof much like the vamps did on Buffy and that this may have been written before there was much realistic blood in video games).
For a book which is explicitly about religion and specifically a fundamentalist and evangelical type of Christianity, it’s weirdly passionless. Where is the personal relationship with Jesus or references to being saved? There’s hardly been any mention of Jesus and the way Heaven is described, it’s like Beale decided to lift the wackier descriptions from the Middle Ages wholecloth. And everything is literal; it’s not that the Cherubim are impossible for humans to really comprehend, it’s that they actually do have six wings according to the narrative. I think it’s the bloody-minded literalness of the book that I find the most frustrating. Where is the sense of the numinous, of awe?
Add to that confusing descriptions, constant references to Warhammer, Christopher’s massive sense of entitlement combined with toxic masculinity (which is jarring for me, as I listen to J.D. Robb novels in the car and the murderer in the current one is basically Christopher but ten years older and meaner)…
In conclusion:
As much as I am enjoying watching this happen (like a fiction train wreck!), I am so sorry you have to endure it.
I’m reading His Majesty’s Dragon, by Naomi Novik, which somehow I have managed to miss, all these years. SO MUCH BETTER than Theo’s dull and stupid writing.
Oh, yes. Those are a DELIGHT. I have Justine Larbalestier’s “The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction”, Cixin Liu’s “Three Body Problem”, and Jo Walton’s “The Just City” going on right now. Thinking about getting Ken Liu’s “Grace of Kings”, too. So I’m certainly not lacking for good reading material. Thank goodness.
Some variations in Latin spelling are okay: how classical or how medieval are you feeling, basically. These change the meaning of the sentence enough that it’s hard to construe. “hominus” is nominative, whereas the saying has genitive -is. “fragilitatum” and “securitatum” are genitive plurals in place of accusative singulars (-em). Bacon’s version works out as something like “It’s great to have the fragility of a human, the security of a god.” This version is something like “It’s great to have a man of the frailties and securities of a god,” which is as awkward in Latin as in my English. It’s not quite right, and you’d expect “-que” or some other “and”-type marker if “fragilitatum” and “securitatum” are newly parallel.
In fairness, minor mods to aphorisms are commonplace in Latinate contexts. (This may be the only time I attempt to rationalize something Beale has written.)
@Sharon: In fact, I’ve messed up my own thing because one’d need “hominem” to make my revision work. The remarks about gen. pl. and so on are right.
Y’know, I keep thinking of Charles Williams’s WAR IN HEAVEN — it may be ten thousand varieties of effed up, but it *is* compulsively readable.
I don’t want to lean too much on minimal data points, but all the religious fantasy I can think of written by Roman Catholics (okay, and Anglicans and Mormons, too, but this fits in with my thesis, wait for it) may be problematic (even loathesome), but is never dull; while that written by Protestants may be worthy, but is just boring*? Even pointing and laughing palls after a while.
I would suspect it has something to do with the low-church disdain for education (which bestows, among other gifts, practical writing tips) and even more, suspicious of all sensual pleasures. It’s hard to write a gripping fantasy when you are worried that evocative description of scents or flavors, etc. will send your readers straight to Hell.
*Counter-examples gratefully received
“And the way these last two chapters were written were really confusing–Beale uses “angels” to refer to both fallen and unfallen angels, so it’s hard to follow the action and who was stabbing whom.”
This is where a background writing slash or porn might have helped. Good slash, yaoi, yuri or femslash writers quickly learn that when you have two participants in a scene who can both use the same pronoun (or other non-nominative descriptor) doing things to each other, NAMES HELP in determining who did what with which to whom. Means your poor unfortunate reader doesn’t have to go back over the same paragraph three times trying to figure out the dynamics.
Of course, this would mean he’d have to learn something from either a) fan fiction writers; b) women; or c) non-Americans, which concepts would probably break his brain.
“There are NINE circles of hell according to Dante. NINE. Which two have you decided don’t count, Beale?”
I’m willing to bet he doesn’t feel defamation and slander are crimes which deserve being sent to hell (out of pure self-interest, of course). I also suspect he doesn’t really count the fraudulent among the residents of hell, because otherwise his dear old dad might be in for a bad time in the afterlife, and that would never do. Especially since Teddy appears to have swallowed a lot of Daddy’s moonshine before he started making, and drinking, his own.