February 17, 2008

  • Review:

    Big Time

    Log24 on Feb. 13:

    New York Times today--
    "Plot Would Thicken, if the
    Writers Remembered It    "

    "We've lost the plot!"
    -- Slipstream


    Nicole Kidman in 'The Human Stain' at VideoSpider.tv

    Excerpt from Fritz Leiber's
    "Damnation
    Morning," 1959

    Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun
    it's cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on
    her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom
    where I'd hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, "Look, Buster, do
    you want to live?"....

    Her right arm was raised and bent, the elbow touching the
    door frame, the hand brushing back the very dark bangs from her forehead
    to show me the sigil, as if that had a bearing on her question.

    Fritz Leiber's 'Spider' symbol

    Bordered version
    of the sigil

    The sigil was an eight-limbed asterisk made of fine dark
    lines and about as big as a silver dollar.  An X superimposed on a
    plus sign.  It looked permanent....

    ... "Here is how it stacks up:  You've bought your way
    with something other than money into an organization of which I am an
    agent...."

    "It's a very big organization," she went on, as if warning
    me.  "Call it an empire or a power if you like.  So far as you
    are concerned, it has always existed and always will exist.  It has
    agents everywhere, literally.  Space and time are no barriers to
    it.  Its purpose, so far as you will ever be able to know it, is to
    change, for its own aggrandizement, not only the present and the future,
    but also the past.  It is a ruthlessly competitive organization and
    is merciless to its employees."

    "I. G. Farben?" I asked grabbing nervously and clumsily at
    humor.

    She didn't rebuke my flippancy, but said, "And it isn't the
    Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Avenging Angels or the Black
    Hand, either, though its enemies give it a nastier name."

    "Which is?" I asked.

    "The Spiders," she said.

    That word gave me the shudders, coming so suddenly.  I
    expected the sigil to step off her forehead and scuttle down her face and
    leap at me-- something like that.

    She watched me.  "You might call it the Double Cross,"
    she suggested, "if that seems better."

    Related material:
    the previous entry.