Miracleman And The Prisoner

I compared V For Vendetta and The Prisoner here and here.

In The Prisoner episode, "A, B and C," No 2 observes No 6's dreams on a screen and manipulates the dreams. This is like the para-reality programming. In the episode, "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling," the Village puts No 6's mind into another body.

In Neil Gaiman's Miracleman, the Qys (alien) called "Mors" (Latin for "death") asks Warhol no 6 to befriend Gargunza no 6 who is a prisoner but tries to escape after six months - also after Mors has given him a pomegranate, a mythological reference.

Also, former spies are subjected to para-reality programming and confined in "the City," of which Evelyn Cream says that he is its Number One. When No 1860 is allowed out into the real world, she wonders whether there is a realer world beyond it and feels that she is still being watched, just as No 6 realizes that he is not free from his enemies even when he is back in London.

Black Orchid And The Rubaiyat

By rereading Neil Gaiman's and Dave McKean's Black Orchid, Book One, I have learned Quatrain 26 of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

"Oh, come with old Khayyam and leave the Wise
"To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
"One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
"The flower that once has blown forever dies."

Why does he say "blown"?

Wiki tells me that "Rubaiyat" means "quatrains."

Worlds And Words

I copied this post from Poul Anderson Appreciation because it mentions Miracleman and Smallville:

SM Stirling, "Shikari in Galveston" IN Worlds That Weren't (New York, 2003), pp. 63-148.

Science fiction writers show words changing their meanings in the future. In Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time, Jack Havig, time traveling to his future, meets a young woman who, when asked what she does with her time, replies that she jokes a lot. An amateur comedienne? However, when she and he share a picnic with no one else present, she announces that she had figured they could joke after eating but why not before and after?

(15 Mar: Also relevant is Anderson's "A Tragedy of Errors.")

In Neil Gaiman's sequel to Alan Moore's Miracleman, "London" means an event as "Hiroshima" does to us and "Kidding" has become a swear word because of what the Kid did in London. (Alan Moore had asked, "What would someone with Superman's strength and speed but not his scruples do?" He then answered this question with extremely detailed instructions to a comic strip artist.)

In SM Stirling's "Shikari in Galveston," a Bengali trader surprises us by telling Eric King that the local savages "'...are a clean people...'" (p. 80) Clean? King has just complained of sweat, squalor, smoke, sewage and stink. However, the trader's use of the word "clean" does not refer to hygiene. He spells it out:

"'From the time of the Fall.'" (ibid.)

King understands:

"King nodded...that was one of the fundamental distinctions in the modern world, between those whose ancestors had eaten men in the terrible years after the hammer from the skies struck, and those who hadn't. The only more fundamental one was between those who still did, and the rest of humanity." (ibid.)

And I am certain that the use of the word "clean" would be extended in precisely this way in those circumstances.

Tomorrow there will be a family outing for Mothers' Day (we have two mothers in the household) so maybe not much time for posting. Before turning in this evening, I have had to stop reading Stieg Larsson in order to post and must now stop posting in order to watch Smallville. Retirement, as expected, is an endless choice between enjoyable activities.

One Or Many Worlds?

Fantasy writers know modern cosmology but continue to write stories in which extra-cosmic forces seem to focus specifically on just one planet:

when Neil Gaiman's Dream of the Endless enters the waking world, it is the waking world of Earth;

in the seventeenth century, Destruction of the Endless abandoned his realm because Newtonian speculation about the inter-convertibility of light and matter was the first step towards nuclear conflict, as he knew from his experiences in many other worlds - this implies that the Endless base themselves in one world at a time;

when Mike Carey's Lucifer creates a universe, he and others from his father's universe visit only a single planet in the new universe;

when Lucifer's protege, Elaine, creates a universe, she focuses only on a single planet within it and finds even that difficult.

However:

Death of the Endless says that she is simultaneously present for the deaths of organisms on an extra-solar planet;

the single Martian living on Earth sees the Martian Dream;

Gaiman's current The Sandman prequel at last shows Dream's interstellar journey which involves extraterrestrial aspects of Dream.

A Missed Connection

In the previous post, I mentioned modern continuations of the Arthurian legend, including Tolkien's unfinished poem and Lewis' and Gaiman's treatments of Merlin. I also contrasted Gaiman's time traveling Tim Hunter meeting the young Merlin with Lewis' space traveling Elwin Ransom meeting the revived Merlin and the undying Arthur. I thought that these were neat connections. To completely tie these three authors together, we can add that, of course, Tolkien and Lewis were friends and that both Lewis and Gaiman reference Tolkien in their fiction.

However, I missed a whole heap of other connections between Tolkien, Lewis, space travel, time travel, "Elwin" and Atlantis. (Tim Hunter also visits Atlantis.)

Lewis and Tolkien agreed that Lewis would write a space travel story, which became the first Ransom novel, and that Tolkien would write a time travel story - the unfinished The Lost Road, which would have taken its hero to Atlantis. A modern character was to have have been called "Elwin, "Elf-friend," whereas Ransom's "Elwin" means "friend of the eldila." Information about The Lost Road and about Numenor, Tolkien's version of Atlantis (referenced by Ransom), are in Volume V of The History Of Middle-earth by Christopher Tolkien.

Gaiman, through the DC Comics Atlantean magician Arion, rightly tells us that there are many Atlantises.

Arthur And Merlin

I am reading JRR Tolkien's unfinished alliterative poem, The Fall Of Arthur (London, 2013), and reflecting on the continuation of the Arthurian legend into novels, films and TV series. Neil Gaiman's time traveling Tim Hunter meets the young Merlin in the past whereas CS Lewis' space traveling Elwin Ransom meets the revived Merlinus Ambrosius on Earth, then joins the undying Arthur on Venus. Gaiman's Neverwhere refers to Merlin's master, Blaise.

Tolkien wrote not a novel incorporating Arthur or Merlin but a poem in modern English though in ancient style:

                             "Time is changing;
"the West waning,  a wind rising
"in the waxing East. The world falters.
"New tides are running  in the narrow waters." (p. 32)

This rhythm recalled to my mind Gaiman's competition between Dream and Choronzon (although I am now less sure of the similarity):

Dream: I am a hunter, horse-mounted, wolf-stabbing.
Choronzon: I am a horsefly, horse-stinging, hunter-throwing. (etc)
- Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Preludes And Nocturnes (New York, 1991), p. 123.

A Little More On Time Travel

See here.

I said earlier that, in Neil Gaiman's The Books Of Magic series, the title of each individual volume is on the title page though not on the front cover. I see now that it is also on the spine but this is so thin as to be almost unnoticeable.

Volume IV, The Road To Nowhere, involves time travel. In any carefully written time travel story, it is necessary to heed any apparently inconsequential remarks that may turn out to be significant later. Of course, that is necessary in any fiction but time travel adds an extra dimension. A figure in the background of a scene may turn out to be a character who, later in the story, sets out to travel pastwards in order to observe or intervene in that earlier moment.

When Tim and Mr E pass through the sixtieth century, they are addressed by a disembodied voice that asks them where they are from and, when told "the past, the twentieth century," continues:

"We have a throwback to be punished/scolded/rehabilitated) not pleasing here [will you expropriate him to your time/?" (p. 21)

When Tim sounds uncertain, the voice, unconcerned, says that it has:

"...located your lodging date-line now ( will be jimdandy for the madchild...)" (ibid.) 

So someone will be sent from the sixtieth to the twentieth century because, in the sixtieth, he is regarded as a throwback, as mad and as a child. Does this correspond to any known DC character? I thought that it might refer to Mr E walking back from the end of time. He is a throwback and mad though hardly a child but maybe he seems such in the sixtieth?

Booster Gold is a superhero of questionable maturity who has time traveled from (maybe it is the sixtieth?) to the twentieth century but this seems like a different scenario. (Later: No, the twenty-fifth.)

Sixties Talk

For someone who was in his childhood in the sixties, Neil Gaiman exactly captures the feel of 1960's counterculture speech in his Swamp Thing Annual. Brother Power, shot by a swearing emergency service worker, says:

"Don't go-go uptight brother I'm telling it like it is...That's not a very beautiful people thing to do, you dig?"
- Neil Gaiman, Midnight Days (New York, 1999), p. 30.

Later:

"I'm on an 'All living things are my brothers' trip. And on an 'All non-living things are also my brothers' trip." (p. 52)

And, when Brother Power sets off to find America, that would-be hippy, Chester, comments:

"...that's like a really kinda sixties thing to do..." (p. 54)

Brother Power was disrupting rescue operations by growing large multiple bodies, as the plant elemental, Swamp Thing, had done in Gotham City. However, Chester persuades the brother to change direction just by talking to him while meanwhile Abby receives intelligence on this puppet elemental from the Green. Thus, for once, the counterculture types and the defenders of the status quo manage to work in harmony and maybe to save a few lives.

Continuity

In the introduction to his Swamp Thing Annual story, Neil Gaiman writes:

"Firestorm the Nuclear Man was Captain Atom until the day when I sat down to write the story. Continuity had changed. Some of the Firestorm word balloons were rewritten by other people a day or so before it was printed. Continuity had changed.

"The idea of writing something which owed nothing to anyone else's continuity became increasingly enticing."

- Neil Gaiman, Midnight Days (New York, 1999), p. 16.

Sure, but I think it worked this time. Captain Atom and Firestorm are two nuclear-powered superheroes. It does not affect Gaiman's story if someone else rewrote a few parts of Firework's dialogue to keep them in continuity.

I am mainly impressed by the fact the story succeeds on both levels. It fits perfectly into the DC Comics continuity of the time and it also is a memorable work whose quality transcends and outlasts that continuity. Gaiman, like Alan Moore, simply writes on a different level. Instead of "In the Batcave...," he gives us, "There was a man who lived in darkness..." (quoted in the previous post).

Another brilliant fusion of Gaiman's own story-telling with continuity occurs when Mr E tells Tim Hunter:

"I met the Superman once. He had a firm handshake."
- Neil Gaiman, The Books Of Magic: The Road To Nowhere (New York, 1991), p. 15.

I should think he would have. That single reference would have sufficed. However, E, conscious of his own blindness, adds:

"He was a good man and powerful. I was not jealous of him. I did not envy his eyes, though they can see the very nuclei of atoms." (ibid.)

Can they? I am not sure that photonic sight works sub-atomically.

OAM II

In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series, we are definitely told by no less an authority than Destiny of the Endless that Roderick Burgess founded the Order of Ancient Mysteries at the turn of the twentieth century and yet in Sandman Midnight Theatre (New York, 1995), someone speaking for the Order announces that, seventeen hundred and eleven years previously, the mage Anilin had fled from Constaninople "...to Albion, where he became the Order's first magus." (p. 41)

Does the Order claim to have records of an unbroken line of maguses from Anilin to Burgess? Gaiman here parodies those who claim ancient credentials for current practices. Someone in a local moot claimed that her family had preserved a Book of Shadows for forty generations but Pagan scholars ridiculed such a claim. We were surprised when a Traveler woman recounted how she had been brought up in a polytheist community but that community had dispersed by the time she was telling us about it.

The OAM is a fictitious organization and Gaiman makes clear that its leaders are dishonest, even compromising and blackmailing wealthy supporters. He invented the Order as background for the imprisonment of Dream in The Sandman comic but, fortunately, was given the opportunity to expand on it further in the Sandman crossover special, Midnight Theatre.

Midnight Days

Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days (New York, 1999), like Alan Moore's Across The Universe, collects its author's DC Universe short fiction. In Gaiman's case, these comprise:

a never before drawn or published Swamp Thing short story;
a Swamp Thing annual about what Swampy's friends did while he was time traveling in the monthly comic written by Rick Veitch;
a short story that completed the annual;
one issue of John Constantine: Hellblazer (thus, Gaiman wrote two comics about Constantine because this Alan Moore-created character also starred in The Sandman no 3);
Sandman Midnight Theatre, about the Golden Age Sandman meeting the imprisoned Dream of the Endless in 1939.

Thus, these five items represent only three previously published comics. The three issue Black Orchid mini-series would perhaps have been too long to include and also maybe was still in print at the time whereas Gaiman's Poison Ivy Secret Origins story, which tied into Black Orchid, should have been collected in Midnight Days. Gaiman had, at that time, developed a "...vegetable theology..." (p. 16) that would have linked Poison Ivy, Black Orchid and Swamp Thing had he, as intended, become a regular writer of Swamp Thing. Some of the connections are discernible in the works that he did write.

Also:
Wesley Dodds met Dream during his imprisonment;
Constantine met Dream shortly after his escape;
Constantine mentored Swampy;
Black Orchid consulted Swampy.

Thus, there is considerable connectivity between these characters.

Time Travel In The Books Of Magic III

See here.

In almost any narrative, whether factual or fictional, a causal sequence is also a linear temporal sequence. A caused B and also preceded B. Of course. We are so used to the identity between these two sequences that we expect it to continue even in a narrative featuring time travel.

In Neil Gaiman's The Books Of Magic: The Road To Nowhere (New York, 1991):

(i) Tim Hunter departs into the future with Mr E;
(ii) they fail to return;
(iii) increasingly concerned, E's colleagues send Tim's owl into the future to help him;
(iv) Tim returns...
(v) ...having been helped at the end of time both by the owl and by Death of the Endless.

(i)-(v) is an objective chronological sequence although, in Tim's subjective experience, (v) precedes (iv). Hence, the otherwise nonsensical phrase, "...having been helped (perfect tense) at the end of time (in the future)..."

We automatically accept that (iv) follows (iii). However, if Death had returned Tim to his starting point, then:

(i) Tim would have returned as he and E departed;
(ii) Tim would not have failed to return;
(iii) E's colleagues would have had no cause for concern and would not have sent the owl;
(iv) Tim would not have returned later;
(v) He would have been helped at the end of time only by Death.

However, Death saw the owl arrive in the future and therefore knew that she had to return Tim not to his starting point but to after the owl's starting point. This is circular causality: the owl was sent because Tim had not returned immediately and Tim had not returned immediately because the owl was sent.

Time Travel In The Books Of Magic II

See here.

In Neil Gaiman's The Books Of Magic, Book IV, The Road To Nowhere (New York, 1991), of the Trenchcoat Brigade, only Mr E can travel into the future but, when Tim Hunter has gone with E into the future and not returned, the remaining three manage to send Tim's owl to the rescue because of its affinity with Tim.

Doctor Occult tells the owl:

"Wherever [Tim] is...wherever he might be. Find him. Protect him. Help him." (p. 25)

This is a joint magical effort because Occult asks the Stranger for strength and Constantine for will and faith.

The owl must understand Occult. "Wherever..." should be something like, "Whenever he is now traveling to and will need help..."

At the end of time, Death tells E to walk all the way back, and it will take him a lot of subjective time to "walk" step by step through a hundred billion years, whereas she sends Tim "instantaneously," i. e., without any subjective duration experienced or endured by him. That might explain why the Stranger did not detect Tim's return but there is still E to be accounted for. At the end, the Trenchcoat Brigade speak as if they have lost E because he is "...making his own way back from the end of time..." (p. 44), whereas, of course, if he successfully returns from the future to the present, then he is now in the present, not still making his way back.

On the other hand, E said something to Tim which suggests that he might make it back to his starting point, then continue walking for a few decades more. In his childhood, he was taught how to walk through time by an old, blind man...

The Books Of Magic, Book Four

The individual title of each volume of Neil Gaiman's The Books Of Magic is given on the title page but not on the front cover so they come as a surprise. Book Four is The Road To Nowhere (New York, 1991). Mr E and Timothy Hunter, like HG Wells' Time Traveler, visit the near, then the far, future.

When asked whether he can travel into the future, John Constantine replies:

"Only like everyone else, boss. You know. One minute at a time." (p. 4)

One minute per minute is enduring, not traveling. Travel requires two kinds of units, eg, one mile per minute. One objective century per one subjective minute would be time dilation, not time travel, although, in certain circumstances, this is called "time travel." I discuss this on the Logic of Time Travel Blog.

I think that E contradicts himself. He insists that they are truly in the future, but then unhelpfully adds "...or futures" (p. 5), but then says that what they are seeing is only a possibility that may never happen (p. 7). He describes the future as many possibilities, none of them definite, and explains that time travelers visit only the most probable. It follows that time travelers setting off from different times will travel through different futures. This contradicts Merlin in Book One definitely stating that his future was single, known by him and unalterable. I know that Merlin was in our past but he was talking about his future.

There will obviously be a lot more to post on this topic.

Fiction On Fiction

Neil Gaiman writes fictitious characters who speak about fiction:

Arion of Atlantis to Tim Hunter:

"...where humanity gets it wrong, by your time, is in imagining Atlantis as having any kind of quantifiable existence.
"Which of course it hasn't; not in the way they imagine, anyway.
"There have been an awful lot of Atlantises, will be quite a few more.
"It's just a symbol. A symbol of the art.
"The true Atlantis is inside you, just as it's inside all of us. The sunken land is lost beneath the dark sea, lost beneath the waves of wet, black stories and myths that break upon the shores of our minds.
"Atlantis is the shadow-land, the birth-place of civilization. The fair land in the West that is forever lost to us, but remains forever, true birth-place and true goal.
"It is Lyonesse, and Avalon, and Hy-Brasail."
- Neil Gaiman, The Invisible Labyrinth (New York, 1990), p. 27, panel 2.

There have been many Atlantises because every author imagines the lost island differently. Arion inhabits one DC Comics Atlantis but other versions have been visited, for example, by Doctor Who and a companion and by time travelers in Poul Anderson's The Dancer From Atlantis.

Titania to Tim Hunter:

"You wish to see the distant realms? Very well.
"But know this first: the places you will visit, the places that you will see, do not exist.
 "For there are only two worlds...your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy.
"Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there.
"These worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power, provide refuge, and pain.
"They give your world meaning.
"They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters. Do you understand?"

Tim: "No."

- Neil Gaiman, The Land Of Summer's Twilight (New York, 1991), p. 34, panels 2-5; p. 35, panel 1.

It is harder for Tim to understand because, although Titania says that his world is the real world, he also is a fictitious character visiting fictitious realms - so how is he to see the difference? Titania spells out that our real world would be meaningless if it contained no non-existent fictions.

The Books Of Magic, Book Two

The DC Comics character, Deadman, is a ghost who acts in the world by temporarily possessing living bodies. During Neil Gaiman's The Books Of Magic, Book Two, Deadman addresses Tim Hunter several times from different bodies, under his original name of Boston Brand.

John Constantine to Tim:

"I said I'd be introducing you to a few people, didn't I? Well, most of them live in America, so that's where we're going."
- Neil Gaiman, The Shadow World (New York, 1990), p. 2.

In other words, DC Comics are published in the US so most of their characters live there! British writers, Moore and Gaiman, created the British characters, Constantine and Hunter.

Constantine elaborates:

"...when I was a kid, I thought America was a magic land...They had all this incredible stuff, you know, pizzas, and fire hydrants, and Hollywood, and the Empire State Building. And they had superheroes, and magic, and aliens, and, I dunno, all we had was Supercar." (p. 4)

"Supercar" was before Tim's time. Constantine must be referring to the TV series, produced in the UK, not to any real Supercar, because the series was set in the US.

In Hy Bender's The Sandman Companion, Neil Gaiman says:

"...there was a generation in the UK who'd grown up reading DC Comics from a bizarre perspective...The idea of a place that looked like New York, the idea of fire hydrants and pizzerias, was as strange to us as the idea that anyone would wear a cape and fly over them."
-The Sandman Companion (New York, 1999), p. 20.

Reality, Gaiman's experience, and fiction, Constantine's experience, overlap.

The two Brits visit the stage magician, Zatanna, daughter of Zatarra, seen in Book One. Tim had seen Zatanna on Jonathan Ross, "...that guy who does Letterman in England."  (The Shadow World, p. 34) Ross reads comics, knows Gaiman and would certainly interview Zatanna if she visited the UK so that, here again, reality and fiction come very close.

Describing the DC character, the Spectre, Constantine tells Tim:

"...sometimes it's practically the most powerful thing in the universe. Sometimes it's little more than a bloke in white tights and a green hood. It's been up and down the occult league tables faster than a whore's drawers." (p. 11)

Please, Constantine, this is a comic book about magic and Tim is twelve. What he is describing here is the ways that different writers have treated the Spectre.

In the US, they meet or at least see:

Boston Brand;
Madame Xanadu;
the Spectre;
Doctor Fate;
Baron Winter (in fact, they visit Winter's house where Zatarra and Sargon died in a seance);
Jason Blood (Constantine had consulted Blood about the Lupus affair which, according to The Sandman, took him to Alaska for six months);
Doctor Thirteen, the debunker;
Zatanna;
Tala, a queen of evil working as a waitress between engagements;
Tannarak, owner of the Bewitched Club where Tim suddenly realizes that even the animal-headed people are not wearing masks;
the Wizard, Zatarra's former opponent;
Felix Faust, a Justice League of America villain;
Hyacinth and Leander, a two-headed guy who may or may not have appeared before.

The Books Of Magic, Book One

Warner Brothers publishes Harry Potter films and Tim Hunter comics. Potter and Hunter are British schoolboys with glasses and powerful magicians with owls. Neil Gaiman created Hunter for a four issue Prestige Format mini-series, The Books Of Magic, to define the place of magic in the DC Universe under the categories of past, present, future and the far lands, although this excludes extraterrestrial magic which had existed in the earlier, pre-Crisis, DC multiverse.

Hunter's mentors are the Phantom Stranger, Doctor Occult, John Constantine and Mister E, three well-established characters and one who, at about the same time, appeared in his own miniseries. Constantine tells Tim:

"...don't try to bite me. There are things in my blood stream you really don't want in your mouth."
- Neil Gaiman, The Invisible Labyrinth (New York, 1990), p. 10.

In his own title, John Constantine: Hellblazer, Constantine received a blood transfusion from the demon Nergal and prevented a cult's divine incarnation by contaminating their Mary.

Tim tells the four-man "Trenchcoat Brigade" (p. 5) that he believed in magic when he was a kid and sometimes wishes "...there was magic..." (p. 11). Gaiman tells us elsewhere that he believed in the Sandman when he was a child and swore that he would always remember.

The Stranger shows Tim the past by time traveling invisibly, mostly without interacting. They see:

the void;
the beginning;
the silver city, which the Stranger cannot approach (in Alan Moore's Secret Origins story, the Stranger was a neutral angel, cast out by both sides after the War in Heaven);
Lucifer falling;
six archangels;
the molten Earth;
demons;
dinosaurs;
Arion of Atlantis, who addresses Tim without seeing or hearing him because he knows by spells that he is there;
cave magic;
the Nile;
the Yellow River;
a werewolf;
Pan;
the witch-queen;
Merlin, canny enough to see them;
Jason Blood;
medieval witchcraft;
the old religion in the forests and high places and beside the great stones;
Faerie leaving as science rises - a parallel with Poul Anderson's The Merman's Children;
Doctor Fate;
Zatara, who first appeared in Action Comics no 1, the same issue as Superman, and died at a seance led by Constantine in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing no 50;
Sargon the Sorcerer, who died at the same seance.

Listing the contents shows me that there is more in this one Book than I had realized.

Poison Ivy

Poison Ivy is a DC Comics super-villain attracted to the Batman. She also fought Thorn and Wonder Woman and joined the Secret Society of Super-Villains in various periodicals.

Secret Origins was a monthly comic book retelling the origins of DC characters. Very often the "retelling" was simply a present day story during which the origin was recalled or recounted. Neil Gaiman wrote the Poison Ivy origin, making it consistent with concurrent events in the DC Universe.

In another monthly title, Suicide Squad, imprisoned super-criminals like the Penguin and Captain Boomerang were given the opportunity to redeem themselves by accepting a mission for the US government. Thus, in Gaiman's story, an intelligence agent arrives to interview the imprisoned Pamela Isley, and of course learns her origin, without, at this preliminary stage, mentioning the Suicide Squad.

We are led to believe that Pamela will seduce the agent into helping her to escape whereas, instead, he recommends her transfer to Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, Gotham City, where, shortly afterwards, she is due to be visited by Gaiman's own revised version of another plant-related feminine character, Black Orchid, in the three issue Prestige Format Black Orchid.

Thus, Gaiman's Secret Origins story fits between Suicide Squad and Black Orchid and is one part of his DC Universe canon which also features Alan Moore's plant elemental but, principally, Gaiman's own version of the Lord of Dreams in The Sandman.

Eyes And Mouths

I stopped reading Poul Anderson's prose fiction so that I could reread and post about Neil Gaiman's graphic fiction. However, my daughter has just given me Iain M Banks' first three Culture novels so I have started to read those. They are fitting subject matter for the Science Fiction blog.

However, comics fans will be interested to learn that the central character of the first Culture novel has a nightmare that is already well known to readers of Gaiman's The Sandman series:

"He slept fitfully; his dreams woke him.
"Ghosts chased him in echoing docks and silent, deserted ships and, when he turned to face them, their eyes were always waiting, like targets, like mouths; and the mouths swallowed him, so that he fell into the eye's black mouth..."
- Banks, Consider Philebas (London, 2013), p. 327.

Presents also included Smallville, Season 2, which will provide subject matter for Comics Appreciation.

And Death Says...

In the previous post, I quoted one goddess, Ishtar, and two of the Endless, Dream and Destiny, on what happens to gods. Dream mentions dying and Destiny mentions Death but I forgot to quote the remaining member of the elder three, Death herself. In Volume 3 of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, Death illuminates the stage between a deity's return to the Dreaming and his or her death there:

"Rainie, mythologies take longer to die than people believe. They linger on in a kind of dream country that affects all of you."
- Dream Country (New York, 1995), p. 109.

Thus, Ra can keep creating metamorphae like the suicidal super-heroine, Rainie, aka Element Girl, and Rainie can address Ra by looking at the Sun.

There is also a stage between losing full divine power and returning to the Dreaming:

Ishtar and Pharamond have diversified;
Bast is old and impoverished but still receives a few prayers;
for the Aesir, it seems to be business as usual with Odin in Asgard, Loki bound and the Ragnarok anticipated.

Do all these mythologies fit into a single, consistent framework? Well, they never really did so Gaiman addresses them appropriately by leaving their boundaries vague.