Writing fiction is hard enough, most days. Trying to convince people that whatever fantasy world you've created is real, at least for a hundred thousand words or so (more than that, if you're all about the franchise), it's certainly not a feat for the feeble of spirit. Taking handfuls of words and trying to make people out of that, people that live and react just like the people that you or I know, and then doing your best to make people suspend disbelief just long enough so that think that these people you've manufactured, walking around in fake situations that you've orchestrated, that those people are honestly reacting and not just mouthing the fake words and the fake emotions that you've injected into them . . . wow, that sure turned into a run-on sentence, didn't it? Sorry, sometimes I get carried away.
But (he says, confidently) the overall point still remains. Fake people are hard to write. Fake people masquerading as real fictional people are even harder.
And then you go and start throwing actual real people into the mix, well, then, you have the potential for things to just go belly-up, very quickly. There are many writers out there who make a damn good living out of writing historical based dramas, putting their stories in a setting tied to a specific time and place, meant to evoke a particular era, generally using a mix of made-up and real people (E.L. Doctorow comes to mind immediately, I'm sure I could come up with a longer list if I was thinking clearer and I thought you people really cared), putting you in a time and place that no longer exist. Which can be quite a bit of fun for a writer if you enjoy that thing known as research, spending loads of time annoying your local librarians and doing your best to react the "feel" of another time. Done right, you can fool everyone except for hardcore history buffs (who you will never satisfy) and time travelers (I like how every time I try to spell "travelers" with two "l"'s ,which is the British fashion and the spelling I tend to prefer, this US-centric Microsoft Word program changes it to just one "l" . . . curse you, Bill Gates, for being you!). Done wrong, all you do is call attention to the flaws and convince nobody and you've annoyed the library for nothing. I, being lazy, do not have the inclination to do this thing that men call "research" and as such tend not to bother with minor points like historical accuracy. Or, if you're clever, you can just gloss over things so that nobody really notices. "Time Falls Away" operates on a split time scale, switching back and forth between 1987 and 1997, for no other reason than I needed a ten year gap and I started writing the story in 1997. I make no effort to really evoke the eighties, just setting the story in a little bubble where events are touched upon every so often but at the same time, it's like none of it is happening. The closest I get to really referencing current events was noting the death of Andy Warhol (and yes, I went and looked it up, what's the use of making rules if you're not going to break them). But my point isn't to bring you back to the days of Reagan and we're not pretending that it's meant to recreate a lost time. My point is . . .
What is my point, darn it? It is, and I'll just to make this succinct, that when you start dragging elements of the real into your fictional story, you'd best do it right or you run the risk of tossing the reader out of the story entirely. They are a patient lot, readers, but they will only give you so much before they give up completely. If you're going to insist on putting real people into your tale you're going to be walking a fine tightrope, and the second a reader goes, "Hey, that can't happen!" you've lost them, and the battle to regain them is going to be harder than anything you've tried. Suspension of disbelief is a fragile bubble, the walls thinner for some than others, but once pierced, it's not easy to put back together.
But enough of the friggin' metaphors. Let's get on with it already. I don't know when Christopher Howard posted this story and it really doesn't matter. It's called "Tyrannicide" and it caught my eye enough that we're going to go through it today. Well, probably the next few days, considering how long it takes me to do these things. But you don't know about any of that. The long nights, the bitter days, the clothing that-
Ahem. The story, then. It's science fiction in the broadest sense, in that the central idea of the tale is keyed to something that clearly isn't possible today. Intelligently enough, the author doesn't go into a huge amount of detail on the how's and why's of a time-map or whatever you want to call it. It doesn't matter, it's there and it's common place enough that the characters are used to it and don't have to go into a whole huge amount of exposition to bring us up to speed. It scoops stuff out of time. It gathers things. It's going to fuel the story. There, now you know as much as I do. An artificial stop would have hurt the story, so I'm glad that he didn't take that way out, bringing us right into the story. The one thing that I would have liked a little more detail about, either in the opening paragraphs or later in the story . . . the story makes it seems like the capture of a certain evil dictator, or any famous person, is a rare event, lightning in a bottle (evil lightning, as it were) that our protagonists were lucky enough to be around for. And the story doesn't really go into why this is a rare thing, whether it's because of a timing issue (is the time sweep random or scooping biodata out a dicey thing, often giving you corrupted data) or because centering on famous people isn't easy, maybe because of local distortion . . . the story never says and it's probably wise to not dwell on such things since that would stall the plot but at the same time . . . the event is treated as something rare and we just have to take the characters' words for it that it is indeed a rare beast. I'm assuming that Zach and Fred (if I may call you Fred) aren't the inventors of the device, just users of a machine that is somewhat common in this near future world, but they have some moderate skill at it. Either way, the story reacts like the boys have done the impossible and without anything to base that on, we're sort of left adrift, not sure whether to believe the story or not. Because stories lie and the point is to convince ourselves that it's telling us the absolute truth. Deception is a two-way street in this case.
That said, Hitler. Hitler? Good God, don't go halfway, why don't you? That will certainly get everyone's attention, and I'm sure he's on a shortlist for a number of people who would want to visit other times, not because they admire him or anything silly like that but simply to figure out what drove this man to want to kill everyone in the world and why a country would sit there and let him and even help him along? Is there anyone alive who even knew Hitler, or are they all dead. I know the Nazi High Command body count got a bit high toward the end of the war there, and bounty hunters took care of the rest. I know very little about the man other than what history books have taught me (and even those I've only given a cursory examination to) . . . it seems here that we don't have the man himself but instead a reasonable facsimile, something that looks like a dictator and quacks like a dictator . . . this raises the question, which the story doesn't really answer . . . when does a copy stop being a copy and become the original? If there's no difference at all, is it the original (this theme was looked at in Gene Wolfe's fantastic but head-hurting The Fifth Head of Cerberus where it hinted that a bunch of shapechanging aliens had replaced the human race but had altered themselves so well that they had convinced themselves that they were the human race . . . but if you couldn't tell the difference, why couldn't they be the human race . . . told you, head hurting stuff) or just a really good copy? Fortunately we don't really have to wonder about that because the boys scare the Hitler clone away soon after. That part actually bothers me a bit, and I'll be the first to admit that I am no Hitler scholar and so my feelings may be a bit off base here . . . I really can't see Hitler getting upset and breaking down over the knowledge that he failed in his quest to exterminate everything non-Aryan. The man didn't get as far as he did due to lack of confidence and to have two (no offense) punk kids simply tell him that everything he ever wanted has fallen apart . . . I don't see him as believing it. He was crazy and delusional and by all accounts thought he was winning even as the Russians were taking Berlin apart around his ears . . . it was only at the very end, when he couldn't deny it anymore, when he had no other choice but to believe that the unthinkable had happened . . . that was when he took his final cowardly step and saved the world the trouble of doing it themselves. Without evidence, I can't see the boys being able to shatter that delusion, I can't see Hitler breaking down in despair, just because somebody told him otherwise. He'd be defiant, raging like the maniac he was, lashing out in foaming anger, but I don't think he'd be cowed. It just hardly makes any sense, to think of a nut like that crumbling so easily.
Of course that's merely a personal reaction to the story and not at all indicative of how other people might react . . . many may not even agree with me. But based on what I know about Hitler, which admittedly isn't much, I have a hard time believing that he would audibly gasp and break down in tears. That's just me. Make of it what you will, the mileage of others, as always, may vary. Still, we're certainly not done with the story, or at least I'm not going to stop here . . . we're very much still in the beginning and have a bit more to go. So we'll take Hitler's actions in this story for what they are, after all this is only a story and the people in the story can act whatever way the author wants them to react . . . arguing over how such and such a character would act is the equivalent of debating who would win in a fight, Superman or the Hulk. The short answer is, whoever the hell the writer wants to win. It's that simple. And this short bit in the beginning here is key to the rest of the story, so that if Hitler did act in any other fashion, if Zach didn't say what he said to the construct, then that would basically invalidate the rest of the story. It would have nowhere to go and everything that follows wouldn't be able to follow logically. So it's useless to get stuck on that one minor point, since the crux of the story rests on it, to disallow that is to basically write off the entire affair and that really isn't fair. So we take it for what it is and move on, like most adults.
Moving on, then. An interesting thing actually happens at this point, where the possibility is raised that the new Hitler simulacrum has actually been corrupted by the injection of this new piece of information. That it was an exact copy before but now that it has been exposed to something outside what it should have been exposed to, it has become a different person. The copy is no longer the original. In a sense it's like trying to make an exact clone of yourself, you have to not only raise it with all of your life experiences, all those tiny things that shaped you into what you are today but at the same time it's not just "oh his parents died when he was five" and so on and so forth, but the very environment that you existed in, a world that can't really be recreated properly without a whole lot of time and effort (this was the basis for part of Cherryh's Cyteen for those taking notes . . . full bibliography at the end) to an end that's not guaranteed. So now the copy is not Hitler any longer, he may not have been from the very moment he started speaking to Zach and Fred . . . a new bit of data has been introduced and like a worm it's going to work its way right to the heart. There's a brief debate right after this part, after the Hitler copy is shut down and the boys are arguing, about what one really does with a copy of Hitler . . . as someone points out, he's the worst dictator the world has ever seen, what use does a clone have (I suppose from a historical perspective, he might be an interesting interview for scholars, trying to figure out what his actual motivations were for trying to kill half the planet . . . although he didn't seem too shy about advertising himself) other than to give people an excuse to start killing again. This would have been interesting, to see how New Hitler would have deviated from Dead Hitler, now that the maddening knowledge of his eventual failure had been introduced . . . would he have tried another tactic entirely or would he have just given up completely? Alas, the story really isn't about Hitler the man but more the concept of him, of men who strive for too much power and what happens when we give those people all that power and why we really shouldn't do things like that. Again, Hitler himself is hidden away from us, his presence haunts the story as only a madman can, but he's not the main character here. People talk about him but he's not around, in the same way you probably can't do a story about post-war Germany without invoking the man somehow. Even as they try to forget him, he's there, embedded in the country, scarring the history. Everything they do is an effort to not become that again.
Still, it looks like Fred calls the press conference without any real idea of what he's going to do with the copy of Hitler, not that he has it. And a quick note . . . is "Isorcrates" supposed to be "Socrates" as in ancient Greek philosopher who was sentenced to death for talking too much and died drinking hemlock (his death was pretty badass all things considered, after downing the hemlock like a shot, he's walking around the room waiting to die, feeling the numbness of the poison setting in, and his friends are sobbing away and he yells at them to stop acting like a bunch of women). Doesn't really matter, I just was asking. It has no bearing on the story, or my opinion of it. It's at this point that Fred's plan, whatever it is, starts to go very wrong. Senator Keesling decides to show up and we're told that's not a good thing. One of the problems with the short story format is that you have to convey a whole slew of information in a very small amount of space and that's not real easy. With that in mind though the first depiction of the senator that we get seems to be a little more "tell" when it should be "show." We're told right off the bat that the senator is a bit slippery morally and not exactly on the up and up, so to speak. But by telling us this, it makes us assume that the people in the story are aware of this as well and so I find it weird that nobody in the press really seems to question why the senator is there beyond "Hey, why are you here" without any sort of follow-up question. Imagine politicians in this day and age and how they can't breathe without people jumping on top of them (not that they don't deserve it and we're not about to get into media bias here . . . that's not the point) . . . for the introduction of someone like the senator, for me I think it would be better if he showed up and we're not sure what to make of his motivations and then listening to him speak and act, we start to think, "maybe something isn't quite right about this guy" before the final reveal that he has nobody's best interests at heart but his own. Here, we know from the start that he's up to no good and I guess the point is to make us draw parallels between this guy and Hitler but at the same time, after the huge build up in the narrative describing him, the actual event of him talking doesn't quite come across. He's supposed to be a man that enraptures crowds and plays them like his own personal fiddle and while it's difficult to get the force of someone speaking across (a written description of Hitler's speeches look just like ranting, I think . . . but when you see or hear him talk, even when you can't understand the words, you're struck by the man's force and conviction, even if he is basically cajoling the crowd to kill everyone who isn't German) . . . for the most part the brief speech of the senator seems to be a bunch of random ranting, sentences just strung together . . . I don't even think he answered the question properly. And maybe that's the point but at the same time, why would the senator go through such an elaborate public display? Who the heck would want to openly broadcast the fact that they're interested in a copy of Hitler. I could see someone as well connected as the senator visiting Fred after the conference was over, when he was basking in the warmth of his newfound fame, and then the senator arrives and shows him just what the price of that fame is, that sometimes you get the wrong people interested. For people like the senator, the public face and the backroom deal face are two very different things, for those people who like power.
Which is why it just seems bizarre that someone like the senator, who clearly has worked his way this far because he is not a stupid man and has aspirations for the Presidency, would have full Nazi regalia not only in his house but in full view of people who aren't part of his inner circle. Granted, we're told earlier that he is an arrogant man and maybe this is just a sign of his arrogance . . . and Lord knows politicians have been revealed to have stranger possessions on tap but for someone who is supposed to be a good judge of public opinion . . . openly embracing Hitler, even in the privacy of your own home, seems like political suicide. Affairs and the like, the public can forgive . . . associating your name with the biggest mass murderer in history, probably not a bright idea. But again, for me to argue whether a character should be doing this or that is a bit counterproductive and gets us nowhere. He does what he does, I can only comment and overanalyze.
The part I guess I don't get and this is where we probably needed the senator to do a melodramatic bit of exposition to explain to us exactly what his plan was in all its tedious destined not to succeed detail . . . why bring Hitler back? Fetish aside, what possible good reason is there to bring the man back? To hide him in your house? You certainly can't trot him out in public, and be like "Hey, here's Hitler" unless you want people to start shooting at you. Clearly the senator is modeling himself after Hitler and admires the man greatly, but I can't see what practical use exists for a hardcopy of the man beyond the shock value of "gasp! It's Hitler, returned to life!" I could see him keeping a holographic version of the copy and consulting it perhaps in order to figure out how to best take over the country and do whatever it is that you do once you have ultimate power . . . if the copy would deign to be in such a subservient role (granted, you could just turn it on and turn it off again when you were done asking it questions). But to have Hitler walking around your house? Hm. Not sure about that one.
Anyhow, the story doesn't really give us a chance to discuss what one might do with Hitler Reborn, since he doesn't last all that long. This actually is an interesting concept, that the little mole that was inserted into his brain by having the copy told in the beginning of the story actually burrows deep and is remembered . . . something the senator wouldn't obviously be able to foresee (but since it's data, would there be any way to start the copy fresh, rewrite it so that you have it basically back where you started). The little bit of corruption goes a long way and what we have here seems to be a physical extrapolation of the old adage about the man stepping into the river . . . when he leaves he is not the same man, nor is it the same river (it goes something like that, work with me here) . . . once something is seen, it can't be unseen and now that the copy of Hitler knows how he is going to end up, he can't get it out of his head. The knowledge torments him . . . still I can't see him just topping himself right away out of some displaced sense of futility. For that matter, who reincarnated him with a working gun? With bullets? Someone was going the extra mile there . . . there is such a thing as too much authenticity, kids. A different take on the ending would have been for Hitler to shoot the senator and everyone else in the room, either because Hitler tolerates no other ideas but his own or, driven mad with grief and sorrow, he seeks to eradicate the sources of that sorrow. Either way he reverts to history and blows his brains out again, right in front of everyone (although, it's only a copy, surely they made a backup . . . just remake what you did before or don't incarnate the copy physically, so it can't blow itself away . . . something tells me the senator's plan wasn't exactly well thought out . . . granted there are not many plans that start with "let's resurrect Hitler" that can really end well). I still think Hitler was delusional enough to not really be able to parse reality, most of us can accept that we're not going to take over the world because we're not crazy, for a madman like Hitler any opinion other than his own is just going to be rubbish, small minded people who aren't thinking big like he is. If he refused to listen to his closest advisors, why would he listen to Zach, even if he was incarnated in a future world where he clearly didn't win.
That's probably my biggest comment about this whole story, as well written as it is (and I actually like the rhythm and pacing of this, it tells a complete story in a very small space and the dialogue moves along without becoming bogged down, with Zach and Fred not only talking like real people but like old friends too) . . . it's that we're told more than we're shown things. That goes for everyone. Hitler is told that he's going to fail. We're told Keesling is evil and power-crazy. At the end, Zach explains to us all the manipulations of the plot in good detail, not letting us wonder what exactly what that copy of Hitler was thinking, when he blew his own head off. Because who can ever totally know the mind of any man? And part of me likes the idea of Hitler blowing his own head off again, but for different reasons . . . maybe. He never says and we can never say for sure. We can pretend that we know or tell ourselves that we know but in the end it's just not true. The story shows us the value of words in that a few simple sentences were enough to derail New Hitler but I think there's a lot here that's left unexplored, the notion of "Could we have Hitler today?", the "is a copy the original" debate, the whole idea of capturing historical figures is quite interesting, you could do a whole series based on that concept alone. But in this story a lot of it is conveyed via the narration when I think it could have been better to let the dialogue and actions speak for themselves, that way the reader could make up his or her own mind. By sucking all of the mystery out of it (which it does, in a sense, having Zach explain it all at the end, Hitler's motivations and everything . . . there's no way any of us could get that from context, so that we could nod along with him, or shake our heads thinking, "What is he talking about?") you strip the story of that great haze any fiction should have, the sense that not everything can be explained and that some things are beyond the understanding of the characters and some of them are beyond even our understanding. The best stories have holes put in there deliberately that we can fill in ourselves and debate with other readers about what exactly should go in those holes, events, interpretations, feelings, everything. And I know as a writer it's tempting to want to explain everything because we've got it all in our heads, every nuance of the story is there and the hard part is holding that back, just giving out enough rope to make people wonder. But for us, we've got all the behind the scenes glimpses, we know what goes on behind the curtain and for everything you see in the narrative, the writer has done ten times as much work setting it all up and it's galling to have to hide that from the reader. I know after working on a story that I want to in some way get across to the reader all those bloody nights not just of writing the damn thing but setting in all up in my head, lying in my bed at night trying to work through a sticky plot point, I know I can't stop, I'm writing dialogue in my head while I walk that won't ever make it to the printed page, trying to explain motivations, trying to figure out how something got where it is. But we can't explain it all or we diminish ourselves and our own story. There's power in mystery and I guess that's what I'm trying to say here.
In the end, I do like the dynamic between Zach and Fred, especially that one of them is fairly on the ball and the other seems a bit dense (why didn't Hitler realize his value . . . dude, he wanted to kill everyone). I may quibble with some of the motivations of the people in the story but the tale itself is written well and moves smoothly and as I said before, I really like the central concept and I hope the author does more with it on down the line (the throwaway line about half of Socrates still in the British Museum still talking was brilliant . . . write a story about that, by God) but for now we have this and this is enough. I want to say I hope that I don't come off as unduly harsh here, especially since the story is to the point and goes down easy . . . my comments are as always strictly my own interpretation and my taste is odd, so to speak. Alas, putting any historical figure in your fiction raises the expectations a bit higher and putting one of the most notorious historical figures in the story raises the bar rather high for yourself (the only way you could have made it harder for yourself was to maybe include Jesus and even then, we don't have a lot of hard documentation and footage of Jesus, so he's a little more open to interpretation) so you can be excused, in my opinion, for not hitting the bullseye. Most writers wouldn't hit it, either. I know I wouldn't. But at the same time, anything worth doing is worth the attempt and I give the author a lot of credit for even attempting it. That's pretty brave, I think. And bravery isn't a thing that a lot of writers have. We could sit here and write the safe stories, the comforting tales that everyone expects and everyone is familiar with, or you can strike out and try for something different, to push things in a direction that nobody is really expecting. The former is too easy and we have too many of those. The latter, that's the type of story we need and more importantly, we need a person willing to write those. And I'd much rather see a story that doesn't totally succeed but aims for the stars as opposed to one that hits every mark but doesn't really strive for anything beyond the front row. You have to hit the people in the cheap seats because if you project far enough to get their attention, then everyone else just falls right into place.
Plus, chances are, if they try to throw stuff at you, it won't reach. Sometimes, it's about the little victories. The story of my life.
Keep swinging out there. Even if you hit something by accident, it's generally worth it.
• MB
"You know this quiet desperation doesn't suit everyone, I know it's much easier said than done, but it likes me . . ." - The Rock*A*Teens, "If I Wanted to Be Famous (I'd Have Shot Someone)"
4.23.06
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