Citizen Stan?

The illustration accompanying Michael
Chabon's story.

What if an elderly Stan Lee visited Jack Kirby in a nursing home, seeking forgiveness? In Michael Chabon's short story "Citizen Conn" (published in the February 13 - 20th New Yorker), Artie Conn certainly seems a lot like Stan Lee and Morton Feathers seems a lot like Jack Kirby.

For those who don't know, here's a little background. Stan Lee is a household name among comics fans, and he's well known by many non-comics fans. He spent decades as a writer and editor of the company variously known as Timely Comics, Atlas (not to be confused with the 1970s Atlas Comics), and most famously Marvel Comics. From the early 1940s-1961, he was a journeyman, following trends and not doing anything particularly innovative. By the late 1950s Atlas was reeling following the anti-comics crusade earlier in the decade and then a misguided change in distribution that turned disastrous. By 1961, Lee was ready to move on from the world of comics. Then according to the corporate version of history long promoted by Lee, Martin Goodman - Marvel's owner - was out playing golf with Jack Liebowitz co-owner of DC. (Michael Uslan challenged this version and said Goodman probably golfed with someone who worked for Independent News, a DC owned distributor which also distributed Marvel's comics rather than Liebowitz or Irwin Donenfeld, son of DC's other co-owner. Besides being Harry Donenfeld's son, Irwin was also a high ranking DC executive at the time.) Supposedly, Liebowitz bragged about the strong sales that The Justice League of America was enjoying. This prompted Goodman to order Stan Lee to put out a competing super hero team book. As Lee tells it in Excelsior, he reconsidered quitting. He decided he would stay on and do the book, but he was going to do it his way. What's the worst that could happen if he broke with tradition? He could get fired. So, what? He wanted to quit anyway. Rather than the cardboard two-dimensional characters who'd prevailed in comics, Lee wanted to do complex, three dimensional characters with everyday problems. He wanted to write heroes who didn't always agree with each other, who had conflicts. And thus the floodgates of creativity were opened and the Marvel Age dawned with Stan Lee revolutionizing comics forever, and oh by the way, he worked with some great artists like Jolly Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and Jazzy John Romita.

Pressed for time at an understaffed Marvel and knowing that Kirby and Ditko were good at plotting stories, Lee eschewed the traditional full script method of writing comics. With a full script, the writer would write out what the artist was supposed to draw in every panel throughout the story. Plus the writer would write all of the dialogue and captions in advance. Lee turned to a different method. Instead of giving the artists a complete script, he gave them a synopsis, a short description of the plot and the artist fleshed it out into a full twenty-plus page story visually. When the artist was done, Lee then wrote the character dialogue and the other text. Lee said he did this to save time. Instead of Ditko and Kirby both having to wait while Lee scripted a story for Kirby, Lee could dash off a synopsis for Kirby. While Kirby was fleshing out the story and drawing, Lee could work on a synopsis for  Ditko, then dash off another synopsis for Kirby, and then add text for the first story while Kirby got to work on the new synopsis.  One innovative creation followed another starting with The Fantastic Four followed by Spider-man, The X-Men, The Hulk, Iron Man, The Avengers, and many others. Lee broke down the fourth wall, speaking directly to the readers. More than just a writer and editor, Lee became a spokesmen not just for Marvel, but for comic books themselves. In the 1970s in books like Origins of Marvel Comics and Son of Origins, Lee detailed how he came up with all the ideas for the Marvel Age characters. With the backing of corporate Marvel, and aided by his charming, loquacious personality, and his media savvy, Lee's version of events was the most widely publicized and embraced. But there was another lesser known version.

From The Fantastic Four #2 January 1962
(C) 2012 Marvel Comics

Long before working with Stan Lee in the 1960s, Jack Kirby had already established himself as one of the most important creators in the history of comic books. Although primarily known today as a penciler, Kirby was also a prolific story plotter and character creator. Long teamed with Joe Simon, Kirby had created or co-created myriads of characters before the Marvel Age dawned. The most famous of these is Captain America, but they also include the Challengers of the Unknown, the Boy Commandos, the Newsboy Legion, and many others. Simon and Kirby worked in many other genres besides super heroes. They worked in true crime, westerns, science fiction, horror, and they were even credited with starting the romance comics genre. In the late 1950s, Simon and Kirby went their separate ways as Joe Simon sought to branch out from comics while Kirby continued on in the industry. Although Kirby was sent scripts to draw, there are stories of him simply throwing out the scripts and making up his own story. After, a court battle with a DC editor over The Skymasters newspaper strip, Kirby felt unwelcome at DC and began to do more work for Atlas (Marvel) at a time when they were publishing lots of stories about giant monsters.

When Goodman demanded a super hero team book, Lee turned to Kirby. The result was The Fantastic Four and the rest is history. Their 102 consecutive issues together on The Fantastic Four included some of the best super hero comics ever published, contained a lot of ground breaking work, and set the foundation of the Marvel Universe. That alone was enough to make Lee and Kirby one of the greatest creative teams in the history of comics. However, they didn't stop with The Fantastic Four. They also created the Marvel version of Thor together, the X-Men, the Hulk, Iron Man (although Kirby wasn't the primary early artist on Iron Man, he was involved), the Avengers, and many others. They revived Captain America whom Kirby and Simon had created and who, prior to the Marvel Age, had been the company's most successful character. The company had stopped publishing Captain America in the late 1940s and there'd been a short-lived revival in the 1950s. According to Lee, Kirby was originally slated to draw Spider-man, but Kirby made Spider-man look too heroic while Lee wanted a scrawnier, less heroic look, so the job went to Steve Ditko although Kirby still drew the cover for Spider-man's first appearance, Amazing Fantasy #15. The comics often painted a picture of fun-loving camaradrie between Lee and Kirby. In fact, that image extended to all of Marvel's writers and artists. Lee and Kirby sometimes appeared in the comics themselves. Marvel's books contained credits at a time when artists at other companies had to content themselves with sneaking their signatures in somewhere. And those Marvel credits often contained colorful nicknames and playful banter. As Marvel grew and Lee was stretched thinner as a writer, editor, and spokesman and as Lee grew more comfortable with the new writing method, his synopses for Kirby became less detailed, leaving more for Kirby to supply. Instead of typewritten synopses, Lee would talk to Kirby in person or on the phone and they'd come up with the plot. Comics lore has it that Lee simply told Kirby that they should have the Fantastic Four meet God and the result was the Galactus triology. Lee once said that all he had to do was tell Kirby that this month's villain would be Dr. Doom and Kirby would come back with a fully drawn story and Lee would then think up dialogue and captions to go with it. When Lee got the art for the Galactus triology, he was surprised to see a strange character on a surf board in space. Lee asked Kirby who it was, and Kirby said that some one as powerful as Galactus should have a herald, so he gave him one. And that's how the Silver Surfer was created.

It came as a shock to fans in 1970 when Kirby abruptly left Marvel and went to DC where he created The New Gods, The Forever People, and Kamandi among others. Although Kirby would occasionally work with a writer after 1970, from then on, most comics he worked on listed him as Writer, Editor, and Artist. Kirby would return to Marvel in the mid-1970s, creating The Eternals, Devil Dinosaur, and Machine Man. Other than Captain America and the Black Panther, Kirby was reluctant to work on his old characters. He teamed with Lee on a Silver Surfter project, but other than that, he preferred to create new characters. After leaving Marvel for a final time, Kirby created Captain Victory and Silver Star at Pacific Comics. In this he helped pioneer creator owned work published by independent companies aiming at the emerging comic book stores which were beginning to replace newsstands and corner stores as the primary markets for comics. Kirby's dialogue wasn't as hip and witty as Lee's at Marvel. His books literally burst with ideas and creative energy, but he never again enjoyed the commercial success he'd had with either Stan Lee or Joe Simon.

For his part, Lee seemed to go into a creative rut after Kirby left, recycling old concepts in a tired way. After Ditko had left Spider-man, Lee continued to develop and build on the foundation he and Ditko established, delving deeper into the characters and their conflicts and their angst. By contrast, when Kirby left The Fantastic Four, the spark went out. Lee soon stopped writing and editing full time. He took the title of Publisher. Later, he went out to California where he began pitching Marvel's characters to Hollywood. (Kirby had earlier left New York for California). Lee remained the face of Marvel and its leading spokesmen. For years after he stopped writing regularly, every Marvel comic had the legend "Stan Lee Presents" on its first page. However, even as Lee told his version of Marvel history through the corporate megaphone, that other version circulated in the fan press.

From The Fantastic Four #79 October 1968
(C) 2012 Marvel Comics

This version painted Kirby and not Lee as the primary creative force behind Marvel. Kirby grew increasingly bitter as he heard Lee take the lion's share of the credit for years. At the height of his bitterness, Kirby even claimed that Lee didn't do anything except for messing with the words a little before they went into the dialogue balloons. For decades now while Lee has continued to be idolized by Marvel fans and the general public, the Lee vs Kirby controversy has raged among a certain segment of fandom. There are those who give Lee most of the credit, pointing out differences and perceived shortcomings in Kirby's dialogue writing and characterization. There are those who give Kirby the credit, pointing out that the house of ideas ran short of ideas when Kirby and Ditko weren't around. Then there those who think that the writing and character creation was a team effort with both men making essential contributions. Although he's less famous than Lee, Kirby is now acknowledged at least as the co-plotter of most Lee/Kirby stories and as the co-creator of many Marvel Age characters.

The splash page of Adventure Comics #75 as
reprinted in The Collected Jack Kirby Collector
Volume Three.

For those who totally dismiss the idea that Kirby had any hand in character creation, there are some things to consider. Take the case of Thor for instance. In Origins of Marvel Comics, Lee claimed that after creating the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and Spider-man, the only thing he could think of to top those characters would be with Super-God. Only, Marvel couldn't publish a Super-God comic without offending almost everyone. Then during a radio interview, a talk-show host referred to Marvel's comics as twentieth century mythology. That made Lee realize that although he couldn't use God as a character, he could use a mythological god. Lee claimed that he had a big interest in Norse mythology, hence he decided Thor would be Marvel's newest character. While I can't claim familiarity with everything Lee wrote prior to the Marvel Age, I'm not aware of him using Norse mythology before. At that time Greco-Roman mythology was far better known to the general public. Norse mythology was more obscure especially outside of Wagner. Super hero comics had many references to mythology, but most often it was Greco-Roman. Wonder Woman is one example. Another example is Captain Marvel who with the exception of Solomon derives his powers from Greco-Roman mythological figures. He has the strength of Hercules, the endurance of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury to go along with Solomon's wisdom. One place where Norse mythology did appear in comics was in Simon and Kirby comics. The first two issues of Captain America Comics had a back-up feature called Hurricane. The title character was the son of Thor. This is just before Stan Lee's comics career began, folks. After Simon and Kirby left DC, they used Thor himself in a Sandman story in Adventure Comics #75 (May 1942). In Boy Commandos #7 (Summer 1944) the character Brooklyn meets Thor in a dream. Although this story was written and drawn by someone other than Simon and Kirby, it came from their shop and the late Rich Morrissey, a terrific comics scholar, points out the possibility that Kirby may have supplied the plot as he often did. At DC in the late 1950s, Kirby, without Joe Simon, again used Thor, this time in a story called "The Magic Hammer" which appeared in Tales of the Unexpected #16 (August 1957). So while, Lee later claimed a fascination with Norse mythology, Kirby actually displayed an interest in it in work published over the two decades before the creation of the Marvel Thor. With Lee and Kirby each claiming they came up with the idea of doing a Thor comic, is it so hard to believe Kirby's version considering that he'd already used Thor in comics?

(I owe a debt to the articles of Richard Kolkman and Rich Morrissey from The Jack Kirby Collector #14 for the information in the preceding paragraph.)

Next time out, I'll discuss Chabon's story itself and the ways in which the Artie Conn and Morton Feathers resemble Lee and Kirby and the ways they don't. After that, I'll get back to my ongoing trek through The Year's Best Science Fiction 27

From The Fantastic Four #79 October 1968
(C) 2012 Marvel Comics

Is There a Cookbook Involved?

In Paul J. McAuley’s “Crimes and Glory” after Earth has been devastated by wars, economic collapse, and radical climate events, an alien race named the Jackaroo have come to help mankind. The Jackaroo have transported many humans from Earth to colony worlds. People win a lottery to move from Earth to a dystopian New World, grim but filled with opportunity. People dream of escaping from troubles on Earth by starting over on a new planet. The colony worlds once housed other races collectively called the Elder Culture. These long vanished races also received the Jackaroo’s aid. The Elder Culture left behind abandoned space ships and other pieces of their technology. 

The story has a hardboiled tone. Emma, the main character, works as a detective for the U.N. Technology Control Unit. Among humans there is both legal and illegal traffic in Elder Culture technology. Some Elder Culture technology is helpful. Some is both helpful and dangerous. Some “is simply dangerous. Stuff that could give an individual the power to hold worlds to ransom. Stuff that could change the human race so radically that it would either die out or become something other than human.” ( The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection 94) Coders working at code farms study, decipher, and learn the code that makes the technology run. Consider this passage about the ships left behind by the Elder Culture called the Ghajar: 

“In any case, whether dead or alive or smashed to flinders, all the ships were to some degree or another infested with code. It was quantum stuff, hardware and software embedded in the spin properties of fundamental particles in the molecular matrices of the ship’s hulls, raw and fragmented, and crusty with errors and necrotic patches that had accumulated during millennia of disuse and exposure to cosmic radiation.

“Coders working in farms like Meyer Lansky’s analysed and catalogued this junk and stitched together viable fragments and spent hours and days trying to get them to run in virtual partitions on the farm’s hypercomputer cloud. Code approved by the licensing board was bought by software developers who used it to patch controls ships reclaimed from the vast Sargassos, manipulate exotic matter, refine front ends of quantum technology, and so on and so forth. There were theoretical applications, too - four of the so-called hard mathematical problems had been solved using code reclaimed from the farms.” (YBSF 94-95)

For some people, coding is like a recreational drug which sometimes proves fatal. Emma’s husband suffered this fate. It’s suggested that his death fuels Emma’s obsession as she pursues a criminal named Niles Sarkka much like Ahab pursued a certain white whale. “Crimes and Glory” starts with Emma in pursuit of Sarkka and then backtracks to the murder mystery which led to the pursuit. Her investigation takes us on a trek through the vicious underworld of the city of Port of Plenty (featuring that Meyer Lansky fellow mentioned above).  

Sarkka is a rogue expert on the Elder Cultures. He once was a University Chair. Handsome and charismatic, Sarkka also hosted a popular TV show in which he and his team went on various expeditions to recover Elder Culture technology while expounding what Emma calls crackpot theories. Sounds like a nice fit for the Discovery Channel. Sarkka argued that the Jackaroo were manipulating human history long before their appearance and that they created the crisis from which they saved us. He believes the colony worlds aren’t a refuge. They’re a trap. Sarkka was discredited and became a criminal after one of his exploits resulted in disaster. “My boss had been one of the team who had prosecuted Niles Sarkka after most of his crew had become infected with nanotech viroids while excavating the remains of ancient machinery in a remote part of the Great Central Desert. Marc had seen the bodies, all of them horribly transformed, some still partly alive. His boss, who’d later shot himself, had ordered cauterisation of the site with a low-yield nuclear weapon.” (YBSF 102)

Is Sarkka a greedy egomaniac? Is he a nutty conspiracy theorist? Or is he right? The story prompts the reader and the narrator herself to wonder who’s the hero and who’s the villain.

Bruce Sterling’s “Black Swan” has nothing to do with Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis engaging in girl on girl  action. (And, I’d completely forgotten about that movie until I started reviewing this story.) Unlike the 2010 film of the same name, Sterling’s story, published in 2009, isn’t about ballerinas. Instead it’s about a technology journalist named Luca and one of his source, Massimo Montaldo. Luca thinks Montaldo may be an industrial spy. However, Montaldo’s true nature is far more fantastic. Montaldo is an Italian über patriot, and he’s a rival for a certain world leader’s wife. 

The title refers to the black swan theory rather than the black swan problem. The term black swan came from Juvenal. Ancient and medieval Europeans didn’t think black swans existed, hence the term symbolized things which don’t exist. This proved to be wrong when black swans were found in Western Australia. So black swans went from symbolizing things that don’t exist to symbolizing discoveries that undermine a set of beliefs. The black swan theory as explained by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is that most major historical events, technological advances, and artistic accomplishments are unexpected, unpredictable, surprises.

Luca, Sterling’s narrator, sees the black swan this way: “A stroke of genius is a black swan, beyond prediction, beyond expectation. If a black swan never arrives, how on Earth could its absence be guessed?

“The chasm between Massimo’s version of Italy and my Italy was invisible-yet all encompassing. It was exactly like the stark difference between the man I was now, and the man I’d been one short hour ago.

“A black swan can never be predicted, expected, or categorized. A black swan, when it arrives, cannot even be recognized as a black swan. When the black swan assaults us, with the wingbeats of some rapist Jupiter, then we must rewrite history.” (The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection 83)

It turns out that Montaldo travels between dimensions. In his native dimension, Italy is a technological power, and, of course, the secret of traveling between dimensions has been discovered. However, as Montaldo explains it, he actually creates each alternate dimension before he travels to it. He declares, “without me as the observer, this universe doesn’t even exist.” (Ibid) By the end, Luca will find out if Montaldo’s statement is true.

Portrait of an Artist in Dire Straits

At first, Maureen F. McHugh’s “Useless Things” seems to offer little more than a plaint that life is horrible, and, by the way, let me hit you over the head with politics. “Useless Things” takes place in 2022, a near future in which it looks like the current economy just kept getting worse. However, McHugh never actually blames any set of policies for the disaster. Complaints about heat are only natural in the American southwest (Yes, the southwest again - a favorite punching bag of the writers included in The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Seventh Annual Edition) especially for someone who can’t afford air conditioning. There are water shortages which could also be the result of a breakdown in water supply to a desert area whose population growth in recent decades far outstrips its natural supply. Then again, maybe it’s all caused by global warming. There are hints that water, something taken for granted by us, is a concern in other parts of the story’s America. McHugh leaves it for her readers to wonder about or assume. It’s interesting that the hoboes of “Useless Things” charge up their smart phones and use websites in place of the signs that hoboes of the 1930s used to alert each other of danger and to identify generous homeowners.

The story’s narrator is a sculptor. Like a writer who sinks to submitting “hot letters” to porn magazines and earning ten dollars a piece, McHugh’s narrator also sinks to less reputable work. A former art major, the narrator once worked for a toy company where she made action figures from a popular movie series called Kinetics. As she says, “A whole generation of boys grew up imprinting on toys I had sculpted.” (The Year’s Best Science Fiction 27, 57) After losing her job, she began to freelance, making reborns, dolls who look like newborn infants. Now she has sunk to also producing custom made dildos. The narrator takes pride in and puts a lot of artistry into her work. She starts off being generous and offering food to migrant workers, but becomes less generous after she returns home to find she’s been robbed, perhaps by someone she helped. One of the narrator’s beloved dogs also goes missing apparently as a result of the break-in. After the robbery, she overcomes her objection to owning guns. In short, “Useless Things” follows the narrator’s evolution from an idealist to a pragmatist.

Reviewing the Helvetican Renaissance

Imagine if there was only one copy of a book as vital as the Bible or the Koran or the Torah are to their cultures. In “Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance” by John Kessel, The Abandonment is the Caslonian Empire’s Bible. The Abandonment is a series of plays documenting mankind’s rebirth after a temporary extinction. And yes, there is only one copy. There are no recordings of The Abandonment’s performances and actors prepare for the play through special methods which cause them to forget the parts they played after the performance ends.

The Pujmanian Order on the enslaved world of Helvetica sends the monk Adlan on a mission to Caslonian home world where The Abandonment’s only copy resides in the Imperial Archives. Adlan believes that he hears the gods’ voices in his head. Often the voices prove right, but even when their advice seems doubtful, there is room to believe they might have been right after all. For instance, as Adlan attempts to slip off the Caslonian home world, the voices tell him to run through the Imperial City, which draws attention. Then they tell him to dawdle at the city’s space port. Yet that advice gets Adlan to a weapon and a hostage. Adlan is highly trained in martial arts and infiltration. He uses these abilities to break into the Imperial Archives. Further special training allows Adlan to memorize The Abandonment. After doing so, he destroys the written copy. Thus Adlan becomes the only copy of the Caslonian Empire’s sacred text.

If Adlan can reach the Pujmanian monastery on Helvetica, the Order would have him (and The Abandonment) as a hostage, giving them the leverage to demand Helvetica’s freedom. However, someone close to Adlan questions the mission’s purpose. They tell Adlan that even if it causes the Caslonians to destroy Helvetica in retaliation, mankind would be better off if it were freed from the gods. This freedom could result from the permanent loss of The Abandonment. Adlan must make a quick decision which he’ll wonder about years later. “If I have done wrong, it is not for me to judge.” (The Year's Best Science Fiction 27, 54)

On final note: During Adlan’s flight, there are scenes in an underground city which reminds me of an underground city which appeared in one of Harry Harrison and Dan Barry’s stories for the Flash Gordon newspaper strip. If I manage to unearth the story one day, I’ll either edit this post or add further information in the comments section.  

Karl Bunker Channels Heinlein

Some stories provoke more comments from me than others. That's no reflection on their quality. It depends on what catches my interest and what I'm feeling opinionated about when I read them. That said, I'll continue my review of the stories in The Year's Best Science Fiction Twenty-Seventh Annual Edition edited by Gardner Dozois.

It’s not surprising that  Karl Bunker’s “Under the Shouting Sky” reads like a Heinlein story. After all, it won the Robert Heinlein Centennial contest. The story features a little guy dismissed as having no higher purpose and imagination but who proves to have more of each than the visionary leader he accompanies. The little guy performs a vital sacrifice on a mission to find proof of an intelligent alien spacefaring culture.

Beans and Bigotry

After starting with “Utrisque Cosmi” last weekend, I’ll just continue discussing the stories in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Edition, a.k.a. YBSF 27, edited by Gardner Dozois. 

Steven Gould’s “A Story, With Beans” gives an example of something all too common in history. It addresses two forms of bigotry. One form has been recognized and deplored for centuries, but the other is practiced by some who think themselves enlightened. “A Story, With Beans” occurs in a future American southwest which has become a zone filled with dangerous metal-eating bugs. The southwest doesn’t get much love in YBSF 27. In Geoff Ryman’s “Blocked,” matter meets antimatter, destroying Arizona. “Beans” features an isolated desert community, the City of God, which houses a religious cult, the People of the Book. The City of God evokes St. Augustine’s book of the same name and the New Jerusalem it advocates. The cult’s name also has historical links. Islam identifies Christians and Jews as the People of the Book, and some Jews and Christians embrace the term. 

Maybe David Koresh’s compound in Waco inspired Gould’s City of God, or maybe it was Colorado City and its sister polygamist communities. The cult punishes a book peddler for corrupting a girl by giving her a forbidden book. Gould’s People of the Book embrace only one book and ban many others. This isn’t the only story in YBSF 27 where religious fanatics ban Shakespeare’s plays. “A Story, With Beans” portrays the cult as cruel due to its strict adherence to seemingly foolish superstitions, its repression of women, and its attempts to keep its members ignorant of ideas the cult frowns on. However, Gould doesn’t cast a positive light on the government forces in conflict with the cult either. In some ways, the attack on the City of God reflects the siege of Koresh’s compound, and in other ways, it’s a microcosm of the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. In both cases, force makes sense, but there are consequences. 

Cult members kill a judge and the rangers sent to punish them following the book dealer’s ordeal. So the government condemns the community and drops leaflets warning cult members to abandon the City of God. While some refuse to leave, there are others with little choice. The cult forbids women from reading and doesn’t teach girls to read. This means that many of the women in the City of God can’t read the warnings for themselves. The narrator himself mentions the children. Plus, there’s one person who was injured after helping the book dealer and who is physically unable to flee the attack. The government uses particularly horrific tactics considering the zone’s nature. As happened when Koresh’s compound went up in flames, sometimes the victims of the cult and the victims of government intervention are one and the same. 

Should the government sit back and do nothing while a repressive religious cult tortures and kills people? On the other hand, is the government action - which inflicts suffering and death on the innocent along with the guilty - worth it? At the very least, Gould sounds a cautionary note.

While “A Story, With Beans” appears to ride the current wave of anti-religious bigotry (the intolerance currently in vogue among certain self-proclaimed paragons of tolerance), it’s actually more nuanced. Considering the story’s events,  a response, even a harsh response, by the government is understandable. The government isn’t wholly evil. At least it gives cult members a chance, however flawed, to give up by abandoning the City of God. Yet, the government also seems just as inflexible and dogmatic as the cult. We see many of the bad things which result from religious zealotry, however the secular government response leaves the cult’s victims even worse off. This isn’t limited to member/victims either or to those who die in the government assault. It reaches to outsiders and survivors too.