Alan's The Weight of the World

It is always a pleasure to watch a new literary light appear on the horizon, although in Alan's case, some critics maintain that a more appropriate term would be "literary lite."  Alan's first effort, The Weight of the World, is an experimental science fiction novel that takes its inspiration from President Reagan's famous statement that humans of all nationalities and ideologies would unite in the face of an alien invasion.



The Weight of the World envisions a strangely familiar near-future in which Russia, teetering between democracy and authoritarianism, capitalism and gangsterism, elects as president a young technocrat named Alexei Gorbachev, who ran on an anti-corruption platform.  His project is derailed when a group of Russian petroleum engineers is captured by an extremist Muslim group operating in Libya, forcing him to focus all of his attention on the crisis as it develops.

In the midst of this disruption, a far bigger threat appears:  a fleet of alien spaceships approaches Earth and threatens to invade.  Now President Reagan's hypothesis is put to the test, as a common threat looms over all of humanity and our common fate is readily apparent.

I won't reveal what happens, but I will share perhaps the most controversial scene in the book, one that has divided critics and confounded any attempt to categorize The Weight.  By this point in the book, humans have developed a technology that can convert the force of gravity into a devastating beam, the only weapon capable of piercing the armor of the alien spaceships.  As the humans prepare to mount a final decisive attack, they realize that they must measure the incremental gravity that will result from millions of barrels of mercury that are being pumped haphazardly into the Great Wall in China.  The U.S. president turns to his ally and exclaims, "Mr. Gorbachev, tare down this wall!"



Alan's harshest critics claim that he started with this scene in mind and that the rest of the novel amounts to an elaborate setup for a groan-inducing pun.  Other critics have defended the pun, and some have even argued that Alan has launched a new literary school, one centered around the use of wordplay to convey deep human feeling.  If that's true, then it will be very interesting to watch this new genre unfold.  And I look forward to reporting on it.

Sarang's Render to Caesar

All the excitement in television this summer centers on Sarang's HBO series, "Render to Caesar" (tagline: "Drugs.  Murder.  Sects."), which has finally allowed Sarang to operate free of the prudish constraints of network television.  The show follows a unit of the Roman police trying to maintain order in Judea, which is seething with revolutionaries, cults, and everyday criminality.  Sarang portrays the Roman institutions of governance as dysfunctional and ineffective, but when a high-ranking official's somewhat soft-headed brother-in-law gives away all of his money following an encounter with a shadowy religious zealot, a special unit is formed to investigate.  Although the unit is staffed by castoffs and misfits, its intelligent, pragmatic leader and his commitment to "real po-lice work" soon produce results.

Whether those results will be palatable to the existing political and religious power structure is another question, though, and in many ways Sarang's exploration of this issue constitutes the core of the show.  In Judea, truth is the first victim of the political machinations of the elites, and the justice system is merely the stage on which political ambitions play out.  The only people who can operate with integrity are low-level players such as an arrogant, alcoholic detective from Hibernia, who is the closest thing the show has to a hero.

An interesting aspect of the show is that it portrays several groups in parallel—the police, of course, but also religious groups, politicians, and a network of criminals smuggling contraband through the province.  (The second season will apparently focus on dockworkers in the port of Caesaria Maritima.)  The viewer comes to realize that in their dysfunction and alienation, these groups are more similar to each other than they first appear.  Institutions are all alike, Sarang tells us.  They crush individualism, compromise human values, and smother individual efforts to make sense of the world and achieve anything resembling justice.  Only by carving out protected spaces in bureaucratic backwaters can individuals accomplish anything meaningful, and when those pockets of effectiveness come to the attention of the incumbent elites, the results are cataclysmic.

I caught up with Sarang at the release party for the pilot episode (which Sarang annoyingly insists be rendered "the Pilate episode" in all written materials).  Unfortunately, we didn't get to discuss the show very much, because Sarang spent most of the time lashing out at Dave, whose reaction to the show has been...  less than generous.  When Sarang started tweeting short clips of the show to generate interest, Dave and his arena rock band, Boltzmann Penis, released the parody song "Blurred Vines," which has become a huge hit and generated intense controversy when it was played at the VMAs.  Dave has since made his rounds through the talk shows, criticizing Sarang's decision to film the show in English rather than Greek, Latin, and Aramaic.  (Dave invariably describes Sarang's decision as "selling his artistic integrity for 30 pieces of silver."  He also likes to joke that Jesus was lucky that Peter disowned him only three times before the cock crowed, whereas Sarang forsakes literature and good taste "basically every time he turns on a camera.")  On Charlie Rose, Dave mocked Sarang's decision to focus the second season on a largely white cast of characters, predicting that Sarang's attempt to widen the show's appeal would backfire artistically.

I wouldn't be so hasty.  Sarang has found compelling drama in unexpected places before, and most of the cast from the first season will return to reprise their roles.  When the Season 2 DVDs arrive (and I expect them any day), I doubt I will be able to resist binge-watching the season over the course of a weekend.  The show's verisimilitude and incredibly compelling plot more than make up for whatever deficiencies Dave has found, and I can't wait to plunge into the world of the show again.