Tripods on No Man’s Land – The Great Martian War 1913-1917

Are you familiar with The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells? If not, that is something you have missed. This novel from 1897 is one of the first modern science fiction works and the Holy Grail of the alien invasion genera. H.G Wells, the author, was the Michael Crichton of his day, a real visionary, who fused the invasion literature with the alien element and introduced the total war, a too familiar characteristic of the 20th century conflicts. In time, this forever classic had inspired many followers, and the War of the Worlds became a franchise of popular culture. New adaptations, homages, incarnations continue to appear in our days. In this post, we will take a look at one of the latest examples: The Great Martian War 1913-1917 documentary.

War and remembrance

The Great Martian War 1913-1917 is a 90 minutes long, made-for-television pseudo-documentary, a historical fiction which recalls the events of an alternate First World War like it did happen in our own reality hundred years earlier. To create this pseudo-reality, The Great Martian War uses manipulated and mashed-up historical footage, fake retrospections of surviving witnesses, and so on. 

A deadly and dreaded weapon once, now a museum piece

This time, the scriptwriters did not really more than they transposed the story from the Victorian era and adapted it in a World War One environment. The arrival of the aliens is a shocking event, and the European nations must set aside their growing differences to avoid complete extermination in this struggle. The trenches in North-West Europe are filled with millions of dreading men. These people desperately try to check the alien war machine with their rifles, horse drawn artillery and early biplanes. 

Going over the top

Numerous historical events like the Christmas of 1914, the Somme offensive, chemical warfare, America’s isolatism, the tank attack at Cambrai, the Spanish flu, etc., were reused in the plot. As a matter of fact, we can just replace the alien term with the Germans from World War One. The script doesn’t really help to understand how the conventional armies of humanity manage to hold the line against the seemingly unstoppable, faceless conquerors with heat-rays and energy shields for three years, and we won’t know anything about the fate of Austro-Hungary and Imperial Russia – another major military powers of that age.

What the writers did really catch a hold of is how the contemporary people percept the aliens, for example, how they struggle with the concept of artificial intelligence. Other big bonus point for this work are the visuals. The alien machines roaming on No Man’s Land on day and night are a creepy sight, and their attack drones doing disturbing things with the soldiers with their tentacle-like manipulators raise our innermost fears. 

At the beginning of the understanding

The plot contains several really good ideas, and some turn of events staggered even a seen-a-lot on screen guy like me. The endgame and the development of the conflict hold thought-provoking surprises, and instead of a catharsis, we will face another horizon of war and conflict, and we won’t even know who the real enemy is.

These were the positive points for the story. But I can’t get over the feeling that the war story part could have been a lot better if the scriptwriters had just worked on it a bit longer. The already mentioned West-centered storyline is another heartache of mine. The Great Martian War 1913-1917 is a faithful adaptation of The War of the Worlds, but it’s good for one view only, not more and not less.

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

Ersatz Firefly - Defiance

More then ten years passed since the unrivalled Firefly had started its march into the Valhalla of science-fiction classics. The cancellation of the show left a big hole in the life of the fans or the browncoats as they call themselves. The marriage of the post-Civil War America and the space was a stroke of genius. The stars became the new prairies. The message of the struggling nobodies doesn’t feel less relevant in our times: Deny the authority of the central power, get out of its reach, be on your own way, go always forward, make a home and keep your family together. If that means you have to live under the rules of the jungle where life is cheap, then so be it. This review is about the science-fiction TV-show and franchise Defiance.

You cannot take the Arch from me

After a decade of withdrawal, a new star is knocking the same doors. The spots are shifted this time (minor SPOILERS). Defiance is a real science-fiction show if I may use this oxymoron. Although it’s unusual for one; the plot is confined to Earth. There is no space travel, at least not anymore. First contact with aliens had been made, but the results were disastrous on every level, and cataclysmic events reshaped the face of our home planet in a very short time. What we have here is a junk-civilisation based on human and extraterrestrial technology alike, and the long healing process  has just started after this apocalypse. 

Valleys are symbols of fresh starts and asylums. The small town of Defiance.

The viewers are dropped into this fresh start; the independent town of Defiance, where humans and several sentient alien species try to overcome not only the hate and ignorance of the past but to avoid the grasps of the reemerging central power, which strives to control and plays the power play on the old corrupt ways. 

Another valley where a man's fate took a turn; the Battle of Serenity Valley.

Where do sins end and where does forgiveness start?

If Firefly was about being your own master and taking care of those who matters for you, then Defiance is about second chances. In my opinion, this show was made for a mature audience with honed sensitivity and learned openness. The main protagonists are past of their biological prime. They have plenty of regrets, dark secrets those are judged easily by people with a stricter moral code. Still, they live, they strife, they hope that something different than before awaits them.

Second chances are metaphors for Defiance in many ways. For example: the first look at it doesn’t tell the tale. After I had seen the pilot, I was sitting on it for two weeks, and I didn’t feel much incentive to go on with. For one thing, I didn’t like the reheated concept of the make-up aliens. But I gave the show a second chance, and now I’m hooked. As the episodes run you get to like Defiance. Like in real life, some people don’t look much at first. But the more you know about them the more intrigued and forgiving you are, the more you care. The characters defy fast understanding, another trait of Firefly. The most important thing is that the fictional world of the show feels living.

The new America in Defiance. The frontier is back.

Now, before the browncoats stone me

Defiance is not Firefly but the closest thing to it  I met on TV in the past ten years. Defiance is not the most original, but it’s cleverly put together, and you can feel the enthusiasm behind it. Even the make-up aliens are starting to be interesting. The episodes can stand as their own, and as they flow they show some pretty decent special effects. Maybe the makers counted on the aforementioned sci-fi nostalgia because you can hear familiar tunes from Firefly and the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica (no wonder, it's the same composer) time and again.

The male protagonist Nolan with his adopted alien daughter (left) and the major of Defiance; Amanda (right)

To sum it up, the first season of Defiance (twelve episodes with the pilot) is promising, and the show holds great potential. I didn’t feel like rewatching the episodes since Firefly and Rome. It has an impressive background story and timeline to present the show on these very pages. The alien races are colourful (literally) and plenty. One of them feels like a medieval Shakespearean society from the old continent, another reminds me of North American indians, a third looks like they just arrived from Star Trek: Deep Space 9, and so on. Grant Bowler plays his seen-a-lot character with boyish charm, Julie Benz is gorgeous and charismatic in dignity as ever. Defiance-fans, you are not alone! I totally ship Joshua Nolan and Amanda Rosewater (Nolanda?)! Let’s hope for the best and wait for the second season of Defiance starting in Juny.

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