The many names of the Marx Brothers

Film	Groucho	Harpo	Chico	Zeppo
Coconuts	Mr. Hammer	Silent Sam	Willie the Wop	Jamison
Animal Crackers	Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding	The Professor	Signor Emmanuel Ravelli	Horatio Jamison
Monkey Business	(Mustached Stowaway)	(Silent Stowaway)	(Italian Stowaway)	(Juvenile Stowaway)
Horse Feathers	Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff	Pinky the Dogcastcher	Baravelli	Frank Wagstaff
Duck Soup	Rufus T. Firefly	Pinky	Chicolini	Bob Roland
A Night at the Opera	Otis B. Driftwood	Fiorello	Tomasso
A Day at the Races	Dr. Hugo Z Hackenbush	Stuffy	Tony
Room Service	Gordon Miller	Faker Englund	Harry Binelli
At the Circus	J. Cheever Loophole	Punchy	Antonio
Go West	S. Quentin Quale	Rusty Panello	Joe Panello
The Big Store	Wolf J. Flywheel	Wacky	Ravelli
A Night in Casablanca	Ronald Kornblow	Rusty	Corbaccio
Love Happy	Sam Grunion	Harpo	Faustino the Geat

Childe Cycle: The Final Encyclopedia

The Final Encyclopedia (1984) is a departure in, if nothing else, sheer size, easily three times that of the previous novels. This will, for better or worse, remain a feature. None of the following books are quite this big, (in fact, when The Final Encyclopedia was reissued, it was split into two volumes) but none are the slim mass market paperbacks we saw previously.

The universe as a whole has changed significantly. A Mafia-like group called the Others, consisting of crossbreeds among the Splinter Cultures, has taken over all of the worlds except for the Earth, the Dorsai, and the two Exotic worlds. The Final Encyclopedia has been launched into Earth orbit, and seems to be the only force resisting the Others.

The story begins on Earth at the home of Hal Mayne. He's a teenaged boy with a mysterious history: at the age of two, Hal was found alone in a spaceship in Earth orbit, with instructions that the proceeds from selling the ship were to be used to hire three tutors to raise him: a Dorsai, an Exotic, and a Friendly. (It occurs to me that the anagram for the three major Splinter Cultures is the letters found on the telephone key "3".) You would think that the ship's owner could be traced, and that that would be a clue to Hal's origin, (it's actually the same ship in which Donal Graeme disappeared almost a hundred years before) but apparently that was never done.

A group of Others, including their leader Dahno and his second-in-command Bleys Ahrens, take over Hal's home by force, as a place to hold a secret conference of Others stationed on Earth. The tutors, recognizing a threat to Hal, resist them violently (even the Exotic), and as a result all are killed. Hal manages to escape and runs away to the Final Encyclopedia.

At the Encyclopedia, Hal becomes the first person since Tam Olyn to hear the voices of humanity, and Tam's visit there (at the beginning of Soldier, Ask Not) is replayed, with Tam taking Mark Torre's place as the aging Director needing to find a successor, Hal taking Tam's place as the young man with other things on his mind, and a beautiful young Exotic woman names Ajela taking Lisa's place. Ajela is devoted to Tam and clearly attracted to Hal, and tries to persuade Tam to stay, but a conversation with the ghosts of his tutors convinces him that they want him to go to Coby to hide by becoming a miner there. Hal does just that, and spends years there, growing up, learning to understand and appreciate people, and eventually becoming an authority figure among the miners. This section is unique in the Cycle: it's set among regular people, who have no special talents or abilities other than having (to a greater or lesser degree) mastered mining skills. And where the rest of the Cycle has largely consisted of the protagonist meeting the same people repeatedly during his life, Hal never sees any of the Cobyans again after he leaves. Apparently they're of no ontogenetic importance.

After a few years, Hal, now a grown man, learns that Bleys Ahrens has tracked him to Coby, and he escapes to Harmony before he can be arrested. Even though the Others control Harmony's government, the semi-anarchy of the Friendly worlds means that there are still groups that resist the Others (considering them tools of Satan), and Hal joins one of them. It's commanded by Rukh Tamani, an (of course) beautiful young woman. Her second in command is James Child-of-God, an almost stereotypical religious fanatic. Their Command is fighting a guerilla war against the local, Other-backed, government. Hal, even though he has no military experience, has been tutored by a Dorsai all his life, and turns out to be quite talented. Hal gains both practical knowledge of military life and an appreciation of the power of Faith, leading up to a battle where a wounded James sacrifices himself to save the rest of the Command, and gives Hal his blessing before they depart.

Not long after this, Hal is captured by government forces. Bleys Ahrens comes to interrogate his group of prisoners, but fortunately doesn't recognize Hal. In prison, Hal has two visions. The first is of the death of James Child-of-God. In the second one, he's a child. The setting is the funeral of his uncle, also named James, who had been betrayed to his death by William of Ceta. His other two uncles, the dark one and the light one, are also there.

Hal escapes from prison, goes to the Exotic consulate, and is given passage to Mara. There he convinces the Exotics that they need to make common cause with the Dorsai to resist the Others, and he travels to the Dorsai world as their emissary. While there, he is drawn to visit the Graeme's house. All the Graemes are away, so instead he visits with their neighbor, Amanda Morgan (the third.) There they have an odd conversation, in which Hal identifies so strongly with Donal that he tells Amanda things that Hal should have had no way of knowing: that Donal had been the odd boy, that he always felt alone, that his marriage with Anea had been a mistake. The next day Amanda takes Hal to Graemehouse, and Hal seeing the graves (including Donal's) has another vision: in this one he is again Donal, this time grown and ready to set out on his first mission. (It's the first scene of Dorsai!.)

Amanda takes Hal to speak to the Grey Captains, the closest thing the Dorsai have to a planetary government. Hal tries to convince them to accept the Exotics' offer of an alliance, While many of them are convinced, they need more time to make a decision. Meanwhile Hal needs to go back to the Encyclopedia. On the way to the spaceport, Hal and Amanda admit to their mutual attraction, but the third Amanda makes the same decision that the second one had: duty comes before love.

At the Encyclopedia, Hal meets Ajela and Tam again, and tells them he's ready to start using the Encyclopedia to find a way to defeat the Others. Tam gives Hal some news: Dahno has died (presumably killed by Bleys), and Bleys is now mobilizing to conquer, economically and if need be militarily, the planets the Others don't yet control. Hal sets to work to defeat Bleys. About a year later, Hal has two visitors. The first is Amid, an Exotic he met on Mara, who has come to tell Hal that the Others' power has become unstoppable. The second is Bleys himself. Bleys offers Hal a chance to surrender peacefully, which Hal of course refuses. This is the first of several conversations between Hal and Bleys, in this book and the next, which are all similar. Bleys has a much stronger position, as ruler of most of the universe, and offers Hal a way to end the fighting, but Bleys is melancholy and isolated, convinced that the human race is doomed unless it chooses the precise path he's discovered that can save it. Hal, who doesn't have a concrete plan either to defeat Bleys in the short term or for humanity to progress in the longer term, resists Bleys through his optimism about humanity.

Hal now realizes that he needs someone with Rukh Tamani's charisma to convince the people of Earth to resist the Others. He travels to Harmony, only to find that she's been taken prisoner. Hal organizes a rescue, saving her from the torture she'd endured there, and sends her safely to Earth. Next, Hal returns to the Dorsai, where, in a cold rage at Rukh's treatment (again, his fault, just as Mor's had been), he lets his guard down enough for Amanda to realize who he really is. They have a long conversation, in which:

Amanda tells Hal she's decided she has room for him in her life. As powerful as the second Amanda's renunciation of Ian was to her, she now realizes that they become lovers late in their lives, when they were free to do so. Hal tells Amanda about having been Donal and then Paul Formain. He was driven to change humanity to become responsible for its decisions, so that tragedies like his uncle James's death would stop, but his mistake as both Donal and Paul was to try to impose that change, rather than help people to change themselves. It's taken him three lifetimes to learn enough empathy to correct that.

Oh, and they become lovers. It would be in the spirit of the Cycle for Donal-Paul-Hal and Amanda I/II/III to have missed each other twice and finally connected the third time around, but it doesn't quite work. Paul and Amanda I lived at roughly the same time, but there's no reason to think they knew each other, and while Amanda II would have known Donal, she was a generation older. It is true that Amanda III is the first one who realized she could mix love and responsibility, and that Hal, unlike Donal and Paul, has learned enough empathy to love someone. Oddly, in all the regrets Hal has for his previous mistakes, abandoning his wife (Anea) to widowhood isn't one of them.

The Grey Captains of the Dorsai agree to support Hal, and now he returns to Mara to address the Exotics. Bleys is there as well, and they have a sort of debate. Bleys goes first, trying to persuade the Exotics not to take sides between Hal and himself. Hal tells them that Bleys means stasis and death for humanity, and asks them to contribute all their financial resources as the Dorsai are contributing all of their military ones. They agree.

Hal now reveals his plan. He has the Encyclopedia technicians design a force-field large enough to encompass the Earth, and with his Dorsai pilots, his Exotic experts and ships, and his Friendly communicators, he will make the Earth (and the Encyclopedia) into a fortress from which he can resist and eventually defeat the Others. This means abandoning the Dorsai and Exotic worlds to he oppression of the Others, but he has no choice.

And now Bleys comes to the Encyclopedia for one last conversation. (That makes three, just as Satan tempted Christ three times.) Hal tells Bleys all the things he's discovered about him with intuitive logic: that while Bleys claims to be a mixture of all three Splinter Cultures, his real power, and that of the Others, comes from their Friendly-derived ability to persuade others to share their beliefs. That Bleys has had to hide his real agenda, which is to destroy the Younger Worlds and return humanity to the safe womb of the Earth, from the rest of the Others and especially from Dahno (whom Hal has figured out is his half-brother.)

In the final chapter, Hal receives a letter from Amanda, saying that she feels obligated to stay behind on the Younger Worlds, to help fight the oppression of the Others. He reaches out to her telepathically and finds that they can still be together mind to mind.

This is a very long book, though it never really drags. (Unfortunately, it's the last book about which I can say that.) Its centerpiece is the long conversation between Hal and Amanda, which for the first time lays out the plan of the entire Cycle. Amanda is older than Hal (which is in his early twenties), though of course not as old as Donal/Paul/Hal. Though since Donal "died" quite young, and was only Paul for a short time, and both Amanda I and II lived to be quite old, she's older if you count them. The result is that sometimes Hal seems older, when Amanda teases him about taking himself too seriously, and sometimes Amanda seems older, when she understands more about the difficulties they'll face as a couple. The previous Amandas learned more about love than Donal and Paul ever did.

Perfect numbers

A perfect number is one for which the sum of its factors (including 1, but not including itself) equals itself. The smallest perfect number is 6, since its factors are 1, 2, and 3, and 1 + 2 + 3 = 6. The next is 28, whose factors are 1, 2, 4, 7, and 14.

6 and 28 are the start of a pattern; both are the product of a power of 2 and and less than the next power of two. In other words, they are 2ⁿ * (2ⁿ⁺¹ - 1) for n equal to 1 and 2 respectively. However, the next number in the sequence, 8 * 15, or 120, is not perfect. Its factors, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 24, 30, 40, and 60, add up to far more than 120 (in fact, twice as much.). Why the difference?

Well, suppose (2ⁿ⁺¹ - 1) is prime. We can now enumerate the factors of 2ⁿ * (2ⁿ⁺¹ - 1) : They will be

1, 2, ..., 2ⁿ, (2ⁿ⁺¹ - 1), 2*(2ⁿ⁺¹ - 1), ... 2^n-1 * (2ⁿ⁺¹ - 1)

Since

1 + 2 + ...+ 2ⁿ = 2ⁿ⁺¹ - 1

and

(2ⁿ⁺¹ - 1) + 2*(2ⁿ⁺¹ - 1) + ... 2^n-1 * (²ⁿ⁺¹ - 1) =
(2ⁿ - 1)(2ⁿ⁺¹ - 1) =
2²ⁿ⁺¹ - 2ⁿ⁺¹ - 2ⁿ + 1

if you add them together, you get

2ⁿ⁺¹ - 1 + 2²ⁿ⁺¹ - 2ⁿ⁺¹ - 2ⁿ + 1  =
2²ⁿ⁺¹ - 2ⁿ =
2ⁿ * (2ⁿ⁺¹ - 1) 

or the original number.  But when (2ⁿ⁺¹ - 1) isn't prime, there will be additional factors (as with 120, which, because 15 isn't prime, has the "extra" factors 3, 5, 6, 10, etc.), so the result isn't perfect.  Primes of the form (2ⁿ⁺¹ - 1) are called Mersenne primes.  Only 47 of them are known, the largest being 2^43,112,609 − 1.  There are also 47 known perfect numbers, one corresponding to each Mersenne prime.  It can be proved that all even perfect number is of this form; it's an open question whether there are any odd perfect numbers.

Childe Cycle: Short Works

In addition to the novels, the Childe Cycle includes four short works (not including "Soldier, Ask Not". later expanded into a novel.)

• Warrior

"Warrior" (1965) is told from the point of view of an Earth policeman named Tyburn. Ian Graeme has had to court-marshal and execute one of his officers, an Earthman named Brian Kennebuck, for ordering a reckless advance that gets almost all of his Force (platoon, more or less) killed. Ian blames Brian's older brother James, a rich gangster, for taunting Brian into taking foolish risks to prove his bravery; this is clear to both Tyburn and the older Kennebuck from the beginning. Both misunderstand Ian: Tyburn thinks that Ian, purely a soldier, will disregard civil law and murder James; James thinks that Ian will be helpless in a civilian setting. Ian visits James in his apartment, ostensibly to give him Brian's effects, and maneuvers James into attacking him with a gun; Ian is shot, but continues to come after James, who is so terrified by this implacable, unstoppable giant that he throws himself out a window rather than face him: a 90th-story window, as it happens. In explaining to a dubious Tyburn that he had planned the entire confrontation, Ian makes the point quite succinctly:

"I'm not just a man of the military. I am a man of war."

Brian and James Kennebuck form a strange counterpoint to Donal and Mor Graeme. Mor's jealousy of Donal placed Mor in a position where he would be killed; James's fear of Brian caused him to manipulate Brian into getting himself killed. Donal's guilt for Mor's death was part of what motivated him to try to change humanity to become more responsible; James killed himself rather than face his own guilt.

• Brothers

"Brothers" (1973) is in many ways a more powerful and more sophisticated retelling of "Warrior". It describes Kensie's murder and what immediately follows. Again, it's told from the point-of-view of a policeman: in this case, Tomas Velt, chief of police in Blauvain. Tomas is giving Kensie a ride in his car when they're attacked and Kensie is killed. Events quickly spin out of control: Ian declares martial law, putting him in charge of the police as well as the military, and the Dorsai troops are ready to destroy the city, if necessary, to find the killers. (There's some precedent for that; the Dorsai have a song about a city named Rochmont which had betrayed and killed a Dorsai commander, and which his troops subsequently destroyed so that not one stone lay upon another.) Tomas, pleading with Ian to prevent this, is met with what seems like an inhuman coldness: Yes, Ian would prefer not to do anything that might reflect badly on Kensie's honor, but if his troops vote to march in the city, he has no choice but to lead them. Nothing in Ian's voice or manner suggests grief.

Once again, Ian's tactical abilities find a solution. He manipulates Tomas and Padma, the Exotic emissary to Ste. Marie, into helping him find the apartment where the assassins are holed up. He talks the killers into letting him enter, naked, while they're heavily armed, and proceeds to kill them, horribly, with his bare hands. The result is a catharsis which satisfied his troops' need for revenge and prevents any further bloodshed. Later, when Ian views Kensie in his casket, we see the extent of Ian's grief in two ways: one superhuman (where Ian grips the edge of the casket, the pressure of his fingers rends the steel) and one mystical (inside the casket, the places where Ian's fingers had been were marked with his blood.) This time, the perfect description of Ian is put in the mouth of another Dorsai, a Morgan: "Some people don't bleed on the outside where you can see it."

• Amanda Morgan

The title character of "Amanda Morgan" (1979) is the first of her name (we'll meet the second and third later), one of the early settlers of the Dorsai. Her great-grandson David ap Morgan is a minor character in Tactics of Mistake, a major in Cletus's army. Although an old woman, she is chosen by her district to organize resistance to Dow DeCastries's invasion force. She finds a grisly solution: the young and healthy are sent away to live in the woods, and the old and ill remain behind. They pretend to be keeping up the normal district industry of metal work, but they're actually making nickel carbonyl, a volatile liquid whose vapor causes irreversible lung damage. What seems to be an epidemic that spreads from townspeople to the soldiers is actually the effect of this poison. It weakens the invading army enough that Cletus and his man can defeat it and capture DeCastries. The point of the story is clear enough. Cletus's advances in tactics and strategy are only part of what make the Dorsai what they are. Another essential ingredient is the warrior spirit that refuses to admit defeat. As the third Amanda puts it "It was a matter of their being able to make harder choices than people less willing." Dow DeCastries is the first, but hardly the last, full-spectrum man to underestimate what the Splinter Cultures are capable of.

• Lost Dorsai

"Lost Dorsai" (1980) is a long story, almost a short novel. It's told by Corunna El Man, a Dorsai we've met before as one of the damaged men on Donal's staff. El Man had been the commander in a besieged town on Freiland; when the town was overrun, the inhabitants were massacred; El Man's face was savagely slashed and his wife murdered in front of him. The main story is that of another besieged town, where El Man has brought the second Amanda Morgan to try to resolve a tangled situation. Ian and Kensie Graeme have taken a contract to train and lead the troops of Nahar, a Hispanic-heritage backwater nation on Ceta, ruled in theory by a titular monarch, but in actuality by a group of wealthy landowners. To complicate things further, the nation's peasants are a constant threat to revolt against both. William of Ceta is manipulating the situation to try put the Graemes in a bind: if they keep to their contract, they'll be overrun and killed; if they break it to run, they, and the Dorsai in general, will be humiliated. Amanda, as an expert on contracts, tries to find an out. Michael de Sandoval is the eponymous lost Dorsai. After training for a military career, he found out too late the he is unwilling to use violence against others. He's taken refuge as a bandmaster in the Nahar army.

If that weren't enough, all the players have personal problems. Kensie has been in love with Amanda since they were young. Amanda is very fond of Kensie, but her true feelings are for Ian. Amanda also fears that her responsibilities to the Dorsai people as a whole don't leave enough of her to be a wife to anyone. Ian also loves Amanda, but, not wanting to compete with his twin for her affections, he's become engaged to an Earth-woman named Leah. Michael is afraid that his refusal to hurt others will be seen as cowardice, rather than principle.

No solution to the military problem is found, and the situation becomes desperate. The bulk of the Naharese troops are in rebellion against their king. The exception are Michael's bandsmen, whom he's been training as defenders, but as the rebel troops come closer, they all run off. The only defenders left with any military background are El Man, the Graemes, Amanda, and Michael; moreover, Amanda is wounded and Michael is a noncombatant.

Michael now takes matters into his own hands. He goes outside the walls in full regimental uniform, playing the pipes. The rebels, stunned, simply watch him play. Some start to fire upon him, but they're restrained by his own regiment. Michael is killed, but the result is a general melee between the soldiers who knew and loved Michael and the rest. The rebel advance degenerates into a brawl, and the threat to the town collapses. The next day, the rebellious landowners come to negotiate a settlement. Amanda, inspired by Michael's bravery, chooses to go her own way and let Kensie and Ian go theirs. (We learn in The Final Encyclopedia that much later, after Ian's children are grown and Leah has passed away, Ian and Amanda spend their last years together. Leah's name is an obvious Biblical reference; she was the wife Ian got in place of the one he really wanted. It's nice to know that he eventually earns his Rachel as well.)

For all that "Lost Dorsai" is set during a siege and the subsequent battle, it consists almost entirely of people talking to each other, mostly confiding in El Man. Much high-caliber brainpower is aimed at trying to resolve the siege (Kensie, Ian, Amanda, Padma the Exotic envoy), but none of them come up with anything, and it seems as though the only result of sending for Amanda will be to get her killed too. The real pleasures of the story are the glimpses of the characters as we don't usually see them: Ian, sharing gallows humor with El Man and, in an unguarded moment, admitting his love for Amanda; Kensie, keeping his humor and grace even as Amanda breaks his heart; Amanda (any Amanda), letting her doubts and insecurities show.

Childe Cycle: Soldier, Ask Not

Soldier, Ask Not (1967, exp. from "Soldier, Ask Not" (1964)) is the story of Tam Olyn, an Earthman, and is the only one of the Childe novels told in the first person (though three of the Cycle's short stories are told that way.) Tam is a bridge across the entire Cycle; he's raised by an uncle who's a follower of Walter Blunt's call to destruction, he's there for Kensie Graeme's last battle, and in his extreme old age he's a colleague of Hal Mayne's.

Tam's uncle Mathias believes that the Splinter cultures have surpassed the men of Earth, who now have nothing to look forward to but slowly dying out. As a brief escape from his pessimism and despair, Tam and his sister Eileen go to St. Louis to visit the Final Encyclopedia, a structure intended to store all of the knowledge of mankind, and eventually to allow man to study himself in a way that wasn't previously possible. Naturally, it's funded by the Exotics, but the project was founded by an Earthman named Mark Torre. An old man now, he's still the Encyclopedia's director. Torre can directly experience the Encyclopedia as the voices of all mankind. Every visitor to the Encyclopedia is tested for this ability, but only a few others have ever been found, and all are Earthmen. Tam turns out to be one. Because of this, Tam is taken to see Mark Torre, who, together with an Exotic envoy named Padma and a beautiful young Earth-born Exotic woman named Lisa, interview him. Torre and Lisa want Tam to join the Encyclopedia, but Padma, who can see deeper into Tam, realizes that his uncle has warped him, never allowing him to develop the empathy or understanding needed for the work he would do there. This suits Tam, who is about to become a reporter for the Interstellar News Service, a very prestigious position. On returning home, Tam learns that Eileen had another motive for the trip to St. Louis. There she met a young man she'd become engaged to: Jamethon Black, a Friendly officer stationed on Earth. The two of them have come back to get Mathias's blessing for their marriage. Mathias refuses to make a decision, referring it to Tam, mostly out of malice. Tam, with equal malice, tells Eileen that the marriage won't work. Eileen is weak to fight him, and Jamethon is forced to leave without her. A few weeks later, Eileen goes to work on Cassida (one of the technological worlds), where she marries a Cassidan named David Hall.

Over the next few years, Tam rises in the INS. He gets assigned to cover a brush war on New Earth, largely fought by mercenaries; Friendlies one side, Cassidans the other, one of whom is Dave Hall. Tam decides (in one of the few generous things we see him do) to get Dave out of combat by asking him to be lent as an assistant. This requires a pass signed by both sides. To get this, Tam goes to a party which the Friendly commanders will attend. In fact, it's a party in honor of Donal Graeme, which we've seen before in Dorsai!. Tam sees Donal, William of Ceta, and Anea there, though he doesn't speak to them. He also meets Padma and Lisa. Lisa tries to persuade him to return to the Encyclopedia, but Tam refuses.

Unable to get the passed signed at the party, Tam goes to Friendly headquarters, where the first officer he finds refuses to sign the pass. Next, Tam calls Jamethon Black, whom he had recognized, but not spoken to, at the party. Jamethon also refuses at first, but on being told that Dave is Eileen's husband, he starts to relent. But on learning that Tam had already been turned down, Jamethon is unwilling to override the first officer, notwithstanding Tam's accusations that he's acting out of jealousy.

The next day, Tam and Dave go to report on the battle, the pass still unsigned. They wind up in the thick of the fighting, Tam wounded badly in his knee, and are captured by the Friendlies. With no pass, Dave is considered a Cassidan prisoner, and is moved from Tam's side over to sit with the other Cassidans. In the midst of the battle, a fanatic Friendly officer decides that the men doing guard duty are needed to fight, so he frees them from that duty by setting his weapon to full automatic and killing all of the prisoners, Dave included. He spares Tam, as if daring him to report what had just happened. Somewhat later, Tam is found by Cassidan troops.

Tam is taken to the Exotic worlds to be healed, where he sees Lisa again. They start to fall in love, but her wish for him to join the Encyclopedia comes between them. Tam then travels to Cassida to see Eileen, but she rejects his attempts to help her, blaming him for Dave's death. Tam, alone now, begins to plot revenge against the Friendlies. He manipulates the Blue Front, the out-of-power party on the small, Catholic world of Ste. Marie, into planning to overthrow the current government, controlled by the Green Front. (The Blues and Greens were, of course, the rival political parties in the early Byzantine Empire.) He also plants the seed in the mind of the Friendly leader that supporting a popular revolt on another world would be good publicity for the Friendlies. The result is that the Blue Front does take over Ste. Marie, supported by Friendly troops. This revolt fails quickly, but the Friendly troops stay, seeking compensation for their help to the Blue Front. Their commander is, of course, Jamethon again.

Ste. Marie asks the Exotics to help evict them. The result is, as Tam had planned, an Exotic-Friendly war, with the Exotics represented, as usual, by Dorsai mercenaries, in this case Kensie and Ian Graeme. Tam, whose intent is to make the Friendlies anathema to the rest of humanity, takes a few steps. First he visits the now-outlawed Blue Front, and suggests that they could help their allies the Friendlies by assassinating the enemy commander, Kensie Graeme. Next, Tam visits Kensie, telling him that the Friendlies are conspiring to assassinate him, and that Tam will negotiate with the Blue Front to confess to this and broadcast that news. When Kensie refuses this, Tam goes to see Padma, who knows what Tam is up to, and tries to persuade him to understand that the Friendlies are not evil as a whole. Padma fails, and next Tam goes to see Jamethon, with evidence that no reinforcements will be sent, and his command has been left to be sacrificed. He urges Jamethon to surrender, but without authorization he will not. Once more Tam accuses Jamethon, this time of being willing to sacrifice his men rather than admit that they've been betrayed. The next day, when the battle is about to start, the Dorsai discover Jamethon and a small group of Friendlies at a truce table. Kensie goes to discuss surrender terms, but the Friendlies attack him. It's hopeless, of course, for a few ordinary men to attack a Dorsai as superbly trained as Kensie, and he kills all of them. The Friendly troops, now leaderless, have no choice but to surrender.

Tam now travels to Harmony to cover Jamethon's funeral as the last piece of his reporting on the Ste. Marie war. Padma meets him there, and gives Tam some awful news: Kensie has been assassinated. The Blue Front, with no path to power once the Friendlies leave, murdered Kensie, hoping that if the Dorsai troops overreacted, they would be recalled by the Exotics. (The circumstances that prevent that overreaction are told in "Brothers".) It's quite clear to both men that the real responsibility is Tam's. When Tam protests that it's Jamethon who had conspired to kill Kensie, Padma forces Tam to admit to himself that he knew all along that Jamethon's attack was a form of suicide, and that it was the only way for Jamethon to save the life of his men.

Tam now realize that he has made the Friendlies a scapegoat for his own resentment of the Splinter Cultures, or rather, his uncle's resentment and his own feelings of inferiority. Tam is now ready to go back to the Encyclopedia with Lisa and work towards creating a humanity that integrates the strengths of all the Splinter Cultures, rather than trying to destroy one of them.

Soldier, Ask Not forms a thematic pair with Necromancer. In both, destruction is represented by Walter Blunt and the desire to simply obliterate what one find intolerable: over-mechanization in Necromancer, and the Friendlies as a stand-in for the Splinter Cultures as a whole in Soldier, Ask Not. The two show opposite forms of creation: in the first, it's to allow humanity to separate into different cultures; in the other, it's to begin weaving them back together. What makes Soldier, Ask Not more satisfying is that it adds redemption; where Walter Blunt is defeated, Tam Olyn learns better. Also, Tam isn't a superman who gets the initially ambivalent girl because she finally realizes what he is. Lisa always loves Tam, even though he often disappoints her; her love is a large part of what finally heals him.

The short version, "Soldier, Ask Not", begins with Tam's arrival on Ste. Marie to cover the war and ends with his conversation with Padma and subsequent moment of self-understanding. Dave's death on New Earth is described and explains why Tam so hates the Friendlies, but there's no Lisa and no Final Encyclopedia. Nor does Tam break up his sister's first engagement; he's never met Jamethon before Ste. Marie. This version is difficult to find these days, but it's actually the first bit of the Cycle I ever read (in one of Asimov's Hugo anthologies), and I prefer it, since it concentrates on what for me is the best part of the story, Tam's redemption.

In particular, I dislike the engagement between Eileen and Jamethon. To begin with, her pleading for either Mathias or Tam to tell her what to do is childish and pathetic; all by itself, it proves that she's not mature enough to leave him and marry. And even though the logic of the story tries to tell us that Tam is being cruel by telling her not to go, he's exactly right. Nothing suggests that she's religious enough to be successfully married to someone as devout as Jamethon or to make her home on Harmony, a home where, as Tam points out, she'll be on her own whenever Jamethon has to serve elsewhere. Also, the repeated meetings with Jamethon stretch credulity without adding anything important to the story.

Childe Cycle: Tactics of Mistake

Tactics of Mistake (1970) is the story of Cletus Grahame, Donal's great-great grandfather. (At some point after settling on the Dorsai, Cletus returned his surname to its original Celtic spelling.) In a reprise (or prefiguring) of the beginning of Dorsai!, we first meet Cletus on board a ship where he meets two people who turn out to be quite important. Dow DeCastries is a Secretary of the Eastern Coalition of Earth. Melissa Khan is a beautiful young girl, the daughter of a Dorsai officer. She is, (of course) both attracted to Cletus and repulsed by him. Cletus, as an officer for the Western Alliance of Earth, is in principle DeCastries's enemy. The two blocs aren't at war officially, but they tend to fight proxy wars on less-developed planets. (The resemblance to the Cold War is clearly intended.) Cletus is on his way to fight in the current one, on the Exotic planet of Kultis, where a guerilla insurgency supported by the Coalition threatens the legal government, which is supported by the Alliance. (The resemblance to Vietnam is obvious.)

The plot of Tactics of Mistake is the same as that of Dorsai!. Cletus goes from success to success, pursuing his ultimate goal, which is the Dorsai as an world of professional soldiers whose skill defends the independence of the Younger Worlds from Earth. To this end, he continually antagonizes DeCastries, whom he recognizes from the first as a pivotal figure. At the climax, DeCastries brings a combined Alliance-Coalition army to the Dorsai to try to capture Cletus. When Cletus leads the Dorsai to defeat this army and instead captures DeCastries, his victory is complete.

Even though many of the Childe books could be called milSF, Tactics of Mistake is the one that most deserves that name. The battles that Cletus fights, particularly his first engagement on Kultis, are described in great detail. Cletus is a brilliant tactician, with a knack for guessing what the other side will be doing and inventing countermeasures. The Kultis battle is reminiscent of an Admiral Naismith victory, but more realistic and told with much less humor.

In many ways, Tactics of Mistake is a retelling of Dorsai! starring characters who are less extraordinary. Cletus is a genius, but not an otherworldly one. Rather than relying on a talent no one else can imagine, much less duplicate, he's writing a series of books to explain his ideas on strategy and tactics, and throughout the book he gathers and teaches disciples. Nor is Cletus odd the way Donal is; he's actually quite likeable and charming. (He's also very tall, like most of his descendents.) Dow DeCastries is an ambitious politician, not a driven monster. He sees defeating Cletus as his ticket to supreme power, but he doesn't seem to hate Cletus. We see his pet savant, Pater Ten, only briefly; he's nasty and waspish, but doesn't seem capable of creating the sort of havoc ArDell Montor caused. There's no parallel to William's torture-murder of Mor. Melissa is a strong, spirited woman, but there's no suggestion that she's more than that. (Though Dorsai! never shows us anything extraordinary about Anea, it tells us over and over that she's one of the great successes of the Exotic breeding program.)

Cletus stars the book with a limp; he has a partially prosthetic knee from a battle wound. His body rejects all attempts at a transplant. He's eventually cured by a miraculous form of regeneration aided by Exotic psychology. The parallel to Paul Formain's desire for the Chantry Guild to grow him a new arm is obvious. The oddest thing in the book, to me, is Cletus's treatment of Melissa Khan. She's obviously attracted to him, and her father, whom she worships, like and approves of Cletus too. Yet instead of wooing her the normal way, he forces her to marry him, and tells her that his only interest is keeping her father near as a valued subordinate; once the crisis with DeCastries is over, he'll consent to an annulment. At the end of the book, she tells him that she married him only because she knew all along that he loved her. Which is apparently true; we know that their marriage was successful and led to many generations of Graemes. This is a huge and entirely gratuitous bit of cruelty on Cletus's part. Again, it's a bit reminiscent of Miles's inability in A Civil Campaign to treat courtship as something different from warfare. But Miles is appropriately humbled for that before he gets his girl; Cletus isn't. The whole subplot is distasteful, and serves no obvious purpose.

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser -- Publishing History

The publishing history of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories spans almost five decades, from "The Jewels in the Forest" (originally "Two Sought Adventure") first appearing in Unknown in 1939, to "The Mouser Goes Below", in 1988's The Knight and Knave of Swords. The stories, as originally written, fall into four periods:

1. 1939-1953 stories, published in Unknown until it fell victim to WW II paper shortages.
2. 1959-1965 The F&GM revival, published in Fantastic.
3. 1968-1970 Stories written for the first five books.
4. 1973-1988 The late stories, published in a variety of places, collected in the last two books.

More familiar is the division into seven books, organized "chronologically". (I'll be referring to these as "volumes I-VII" below, as their titles have, for me at least, almost no mnemonic value). Note that the publishing history of neither the stories nor the books is chronological. Volumes III-V were published in 1968, I and II in 1970, followed by VI and last VII.

I. Swords and Deviltry - 1970

This is a book of "origin" stories, with one story about each character before the two team up, followed by the story of that fateful encounter. This last, "Ill Met in Lankhmar", won both Hugo and Nebula and is simply breathtaking in its imaginative and emotional range. If you read only one F&GM story (actually, if you read only one Leiber story), this is the one. Of the three stories, one comes from period 2, which the others (including IMiL) are original.

II Swords Against Death - 1970

This is largely stories from period 1, plus the Lovecraftian "Bazaar of the Bizarre" from period 2, and two original stories. Most of these are set outside Lankhmar, whence F&GM have fled to escape some painful memories.

III Swords in the Mist - 1968

Three period 2 stories, plus two short original bridging pieces, leading up to the period 1 "Adept's Gambit", which sends F&GM back to ancient Earth. Almost all of the F&GM stories contain some humor, but "Lean Times in Lankhmar" is the funniest of the bunch, almost Wodehousian in its combination of verbal humor and clever plotting.

IV Swords Against Wizardry - 1968

Two long stories, "Stardock" and "The Lords of Quarmill", both from period 2, plus two more short original bridging pieces add up to a sort of episodic novel. TLoQ is actually the oldest F&GM story, as it was begun by Leiber's friend Harry Otto Fisher, and about 10,000 words of it are Fisher's. Stardock is a mountain-climbing story so vivid that if you don't like heights (I'm not crazy about them, myself), you'll find yourself uneasy and impatient for the top to be reached safely.

V The Swords of Lankhmar - 1968

A novel expanded from the period 2 "Scylla's Daughter". A twisty and exciting adventure, and the first story in which sex plays much of a part. It's handled fairly deftly here, though that will unfortunately not remain true.

This concludes the original five books, which I recommend unreservedly. They stories in them vary considerably in length, tone, setting, and mood, but all have one thing in common: their heroes are two adventurers who need only each other. They're quite happy to dally with the willing wenches they find along the way, but there's no thought of falling in love or (God forbid) settling down. This will change.

VI Swords and Ice Magic - 1977

Eight stories, all from period 4. The first six of these are made up of some combination of the following:

• Some supernatural being is trying to harm F&GM.
• They encounter a women or women from their past.
• They encounter some supernatural temptress.
• They have sex with whatever sort of female they encounter, often described quite misogynistically.

They're no longer the carefree adventurers of the past. At the start of the seventh story, "The Frost Monstreme", they're drinking gloomily and Fafhrd bemoans their never having grown up: never owned land, led men, or had homes or wives. And, in fact, the rest of the F&GM stories are about how they remedy that. They meet two lovely women, lead a group of warriors their to rescue the women's home of Rime Isle, and settle there with their men. The women become (though without benefit of clergy) their wives. In the eighth story they encounter Odin and Loki, who act much as they do in Neil Gaiman's American Gods. Whether this story was an influence on AG I have no idea.

VII The Knight and Knave of Swords - 1988

More Rime Isle stories, which follow those from volume VI. F&GM become pillars of the community, saving it from various enemies. While they're not always strictly faithful to their wives, they always return to them. In the last and longest story "The Mouser Goes Below", each meets and acknowledges a child he's fathered with a past paramour, thus completing their "growing up". This story also contains some fairly graphic S&M, and should be skipped if that sort of thing disturbs you.

While it's admirable that Leiber tried to do something new with the characters, his execution was lacking and the last two books are really for completists.