Ensign of freedom - The Red Star

Spirituality and the history of the modern Russia are an odd combination. In retrospective, the event that really shook the globe in the 20th century was bolshevist coup or the Great October Socialist Revolution by its flashier name. Whatever we call it, this new order renounced the old faith, it banished gods and started to build its own heaven on Earth at any cost. On the ruins of its feudal and denied predecessor a man-eating empire emerged. One thing didn’t change, the Party carefully guarded the beliefs of its subjects. The new ruling class preserved the siege-mentality, which had come into being after many foreign invasions in the previous centuries. The historical fiction universe of The Red Star starts the liberation.

 

What is behind an empire?

The Red Star comics cast magic and spirituality, advanced technology, the grandiosity of the now deceased communist empire into an unique blend. It’s not some weird Post-Soviet romanticism, which is still hungry for the glory of the past. The storyline is full of historical symbols. The Red Star revisits the essence of Russian history; the relation of people and the power through a magic-enchanted mirror. It does this through incredibly powerful poetic and real pictures.

 

Warfare in the fourth dimension

 

Just like its real world counterpart, The Red Star’s empire broke in a long and desperate war on a land, where the inhabitants - driven by different and incomprehensible beliefs - just didn’t know the meaning of giving up. This battlefield expands into the spiritual world: the soul energies of the deceased fuel warfare, the ghosts tempered into weapons engage the still living and each other as well. The legacy of the  sorcerer dictator Imbohl - a burning-hearted revolutionarist once - still holds the fate of the people in iron hands. The less the people knew about the ways of others life the less they questioned the methods of their masters and their own place in the „worker’s paradise”. Because corrupt power stands on the little man and his ignorance.

Skyfurnace Konstantinov

 

The unbreakable resistance of these muslim mortals and their guardians in the spirit world shattered the confidence of the armed pioneers of their universal truth, and some of the surviving warriors under the red banner starts to doubt the doctrines they were raised into. They rebel and start a voyage to find the real enemy and the final truth about the regime that still sticks to the control of the homeland; their people in life and even after their death. This is another historical reference: rebellious warships carry the message of freedom for the oppressed.

Another important historical reference The Red Star touches how power corrupts the champions of the people, and how even the most powerful and ancient guardians of Mother Russia can be deceived. Power and control are complex to understand and master. They change people, but the source of this power is shockingly simple and it is deniable. The crew of the skyfurnace Konstantinov passes previously unknown barriers to liberate the past and the present. They fight cold steel-hearted agents of the power those insist on upkeeping the facade for the sake of glory and imperial greatness.

 

 On the dark side, the often changing fonts and their sizes make The Red Star comics are a bit hard to read and follow. The story flows slowly through the volumes, and the monotonous patriotic sentiments can get tiresome after a time. On the other hand, the pictures are just beautiful, you can decorate your room with copies of them. The main characters are ingenious enough, and they offer quite a variety. The main antagonist looks just like a cybernetized Nazgul from the Lord of the Rings. Now isn't that cool?

But the main values of these comics are the historical sensitivity and the flawlessly molded alloy of distant generas like historical fiction, magic and science-fiction. Another fascinating aspect of The Red Star comics is how they rehabilitate the historically loaded symbol of the Red Star itself. The Red Star is a real gem. And guess what, it could make it to livescreen in our lifetime!

All pictures are the respective details of The Red Star Comics Volume 1-2

List of The Red Star Comics

The Red Star Homepage

Redcoats of the Twentieth Century – The Foresight War

Happy new year! What could trigger the most cataclysmic changes in world history in historical fiction? The most dangerous gamechanger is not a single piece of equipment or a lone ship but a single human mind from the future. Unexplained time travel occurs, and the dream scenario of military history buffs comes true, they can aid their favourite side with their tremendous knowledge. One Englishman can reshape the way his nation will fight this war. Who knows, maybe  the British Empire endures after the Foresight War. Military history expert Anthony G. Williams presents:

 The foresight superpowers (minor SPOILERS)

This is what this book, The Foresight War is about. A British military history professor (who else) makes an unexpected and unexplained time travel from 2003 to 1933. Maybe it's an odd alien sociological experiment, but the fellow actually has the chance to change the course of history and trigger something better than the pyrrhic victory awaits the British twelve years later. Now, to make the story more interesting, someone from future prompts the other side, the Axis as well! I don't think I reveal a big secret if I tell you that the British got the brighter one.

 

The novel is good enough to inspire fans. British  "Churchill" main battle tanks of The Foresight War. Picture from http://paintfan08.deviantart.com/gallery/7826067

The existence of these two messengers results in that the two World War Two combatants, Britain and the Nazi Germany will be far ahead in military doctrine and technology than the rest. What more, this reality's real contenders will strive for not repeating the mistakes of the „future”. The outcome of this altered war will lay on the struggle of these two foresight superpowers.

 

And the counterpart: the German Panzerkampfwagen IV "Panther"

A cleaner war for a better outcome

The battlefield technology in The Foresight War is more and more Cold War-like. This alternate World War Two is about the arms race between the two foresight powers, a cleaner war with more button-pushing and less of the human element. It's almost a clean war instead of the all out struggle, at least on the Western Front it is. 

The flow of events and the reshaped balance of power reminds me the Napoleonic Wars, where the only real opponent in the open was the British Army for the French, and the Old Guard is now the elite of the German army. This time, not a peace-minded nation tries to endure an unwanted war. These British redcoats of the 20th Century are an even match for the German war machine, and are prepared to set things right on the continent, before the commies take it all.

One single scout plane  in the right place and at the right time can change the outcome of the most dramatic battle over the Pacific

Everything before this big showdown are foreplay, and the book builds up this suspension well. What I did miss are more battle details from France, and the Eastern Front is very obscure as well. The flow of events are not really worked out well sometimes. The endgame is hasty and for me it was unbelievable. The historical characters, big shots are made from cardboard.

The green Americans enter the fray with the new Pershing tank in Europe in The Foresight War

A honourable effort

The way I see it, Anthony G. William's The Foresight War isn't much of a serious work about historical fiction, rather an interesting peak about the fictional use of shelved or afterthought technology that didn't make it to the front in time. It has its moments. If people outside the military history buff circles will appreciate it is an open question. Despite my grieving I enjoyed it, but the Foresight War wasn't something that made my mind moving. It's a tribute for the forum dwelling military-minded ilk and the odd British, God bless them!

Attila

Hippie's wet dream - The Neanderthal Parallax

I think I get it what bugs people in Neanderthals, the presumably bushwhacked cousin of ours. Since the belief that humans are the best thing happened to Gaia shattered, and our taking of the planet can well lead to our own demise make some people wonder about different ways of living. Being a human as Homo Sapiens is not so straightforward anymore. The gap between us and the supposed Neanderthal traits closes by every year. It's not only we had a common ancestor. The hunched, hairy, dim-witted caveman evolved into a conscious being with language, comparable intelligence in the eyes of the scientific community. And, the human club was joined by at least two, possibly three other hominids in the last decade only. 

 The fear of extinction and the Neanderthal agenda

Knowing and understanding the Neanderthal and the truth about their demise might bear answers about the true nature of mankind. Who are we? What can we do differently to save our natural environment? There are very few things we know about Neanderthals with a certain degree of sureness. Genetical and anatomical research pointed out that they were capable of talking and producing their own language. They buried their dead, they made clothing, they might had beliefs in the afterlife. A one–digit percentage of the human genom carried by non-African populations is shared with the Neanderthals, so presumably there was some interscrewing around when the Homo Sapiens and the Neanderthal populations overlapped in time and space. But the when and where is an open debate, there isn't a consensus about if us and the Neanderthals in Eurasia ever shared the habitat, and the exchange of genes might had occurred somewhere in the Middle East when the modern Homo Sapiens was swarming out from Africa some 40 000 years ago.

What happened then and there is the field of interpretation, theories and speculation, just like the rest of Neanderthal traits are, nobody knows for sure. There had to be some contact, genes don’t lie about that. Either the yet dark-pigmented, tall and lither hunters blitzkrieged them into oblivion with their projectile weapons, raved them with their new pathogens carried, just like it happened with the meso-americans when the Spaniards began their conquest. Climate change could take its toll on the already sparse Neanderthal populations, the more prolific new people swarmed and absorbed them by the virtue of their numbers, or all the above at once. I just hope it wasn’t always the classic tribal hostile takeover scenario when all males and women in non-productive age are slain, and the survivor females are for daily rape and hard labour.

Ginger people have no soul, but what about Neanderthals?

The ways of the Clan

Writers in the popular culture profit from this uncertainty, and truth to be told, describing a fictional encounter between the two human species is at least as interesting and chilling as a contact with aliens. Readers like me are hungry for the worlds collide experience. Among more known works, the Quest for Fire and Iceman movies introduce the Neanderthal as simple but simpathetic wildmen. Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children novels establish a whole pre-writing universe of two different hominins and shows the Neanderthal, the Clan as a kind of archaic people with intimate knowledge about their environment and barely known and understood culture by the newcomer Others who tend to overlook those primitive and besides rare flatheads. The first novel, the Clan of the Cave Bear is really intriguing. A young girl, Ayla grows up between Neanderthals and struggles with the biologically determined conservativeness of the Clan.

It's well worth to read, but I gave up by the third because the rest of the novels felt like a feminist parade, where Ayla becomes a cultural Eve. I actually enjoyed the movie version as well, and not only because of Daryl Hannah's  (the blondie gal from Wall Street and Blade Runner) long legs. The Clan is shown as people with unique and fascinating straits but with numbered time. They were left behind in the dust and silence once, just like the protagonist did that in the movie.

 Now I admit, I’m a bit in trouble (SPOILERS ONWARD)

I usually recommend good stuff they are worth to watch and read, but I have ambiguous feelings about Robert J. Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax trilogy. I cannot criticize it without spoilers. Long story short, a quantum-computer experiment in the Neanderthal world (where they reached consciousness and became the dominant species) opens a transdimensional portal accidently into the present day World of Homo Sapiens. Cliched as it is, I was over it. Besides, I couldn’t really follow the scientific mambo jambo, but I gave the plot a chance nevertheless. 

The first book, the Hominids proved to be promising. I started to envision the story as a tv-show, and the female protagonist as a younger Jodie Foster exploring a different human existence. The fish out of the water element is there on both sides of the portal. That’s all well, I was hungry for the sequence. 

The second book (Humans) functions as a suspended tension before the endgame provided by the third book, the contact of the two different hominims didn’t escalate yet, but the promise was there. The real deal about these kind of books is what changes such contact can inflict on the human perception of life. The bitchslap came with the third book (Hybrids) which I put down feeling cheated. The neanderthal civilisation on the other side is essentially the antithesis of ours. And hey presto, the original sins of humanity are no less than agriculture and religion themselves with all the social issues brought with them. Everything since then is a screw-up. The still hunter-gatherer Neanderthals managed to build a technological civilisation without the aforementioned bollocks and without ravaging their natural habitat. Every hippie and treehugger would love that.

This is gonna be a trainwreck...

These Neanderthals keep their population in bay. Men and women live separately most of a month and make sex per calendar method. They practice eugenics so their classic evolutionary straits didn’t degrade over time, and even physics professors enjoy recreational mammoth-hunting under the sky still darkened by passenger pigeons. It’s like some reclused sect in the Latin-American jungle, the only spot on their clean face is the deranged juristic system. So, not only they are physically stronger and faster, but smarter too with a hardcoding for eco-consciousness. The author is preaching through the Neanderthal protagonist’s mouth and points his finger at the deeply flawed development of this humanity. By this verdict, we cannot think and act responsibly about our lives and our home as long as the religion puts the consequences in the afterife, something hardcore materialists and well, Neanderthals refuse to exist.

I had the inside gut that the author demands some kind of paradigm-shift in human thinking, and the neanderthal contact potentially is comparable to Jesus and the advent of Christianity. Now it’s not like I’m against some floor-sweeping by more advanced and/or different conscious beings, it worked pretty will in The Swarm, but do it in a more credible and more original way. This story bleeds through multiple wounds, and I feel sorry for wasting my nights for a three volume anti-religion pamphlet and cleric-bashing it turned out to be in the end. Frankly, what I would do with the author is dropping him out of a hovering helicopter naked over the Amazonian Jungle like deceased Tom Clancy or one of his ghostwriters did that with those eco-terrorists in Rainbow Six. Here is your chance to live in harmony with mother nature, sucker!

I have other issues with these books. I sort of expected the author to unfold the neanderthal world better in the third book, more shades of grey, a real conflict and movement in both worlds, but nothing like that. What we get are the sexual adventures of the female protagonist and her road to the liberating polygamy and bisexuality, the cream of the Neanderthals keep on their guiding us into a new Enlightenment, some awful madman story with bioweapons (how original…). And yes, we get a fix on the deficient shielding of our brain, the reason we are suspectable to religious ideas. Human consciousness came by accident, and the next big change of the planet's magnetic field will make us drooling retards again who beat each other up with bones. For crying out loud...

What gives, the humanoid wolf idea resurfaced several years ago. Give that man a script to write!

Word of advice, if you are really interested, read the first book, maybe the second, but avoid the third because it's really a screw-up, and it does not really more than enforce some American stereotypes about Canadians and their leftism. I wonder how much the author's concept would have changed if the trilogy had appeared ten years later, because some new results about Neanderthals came up since then. As a science-fiction the Neanderthal Parallax is obsolescent by now

Attila