Subject: Ooooooh. Yeah. Good catch!
Author:
Posted on: 2018-03-10 02:47:00 UTC
Gives them energy, but also slowly killing them and making their health deteriorate. And affects their minds, and substitutes their will with an outside influence's power. And the source of the problem is an inanimate object.
Wow, that runs deep. And here I thought it was all a metaphor for over-reliance on nuclear power.
—doctorlit is bad at reading beyond the text
I realize this probably isn't going to see any discussion, since I seem to be the only one here who likes King's really dark stuff. But I intend to write a review of every piece of canon media I consume from now on, and forwards I must march.
Spoilers for It in addition to The Tommyknockers.
I think this is the darkest King novel I've read so far (though I suppose the novella Apt Pupil is still probably the darkest, since all the evil there comes out of human failings). Up to this point, I had read The Shining, It and From a Buick 8. All of those, despite the horror elements and actual murders, still had the classic setup of heroic characters poised against the villains. There was always the sense that as long as the good guys banded together and tried their desperate hardest, there was at least a chance they could overcome the supernatural adversaries they were pitted against.
Not so in The Tommyknockers. I found myself legitimately wondering midway through the story whether there could be any real resolution at all. I didn't delude myself that the Haven townsfolk who had started being converted into alien beings, with their human minds and morals being overwritten, could ever be restored to their natural selves. The line-up of protagonists got progressively grimmer and less promising as the novel progressed: the town constable, being transformed herself and fighting it off through sheer force of will, until finally blowing herself up in a desperate attempt to warn the outside world of what was happening in Haven; an old man, immune to the electromagnetism transforming the rest of the town thanks to a metal plate in his head, who tries to bring a policeman from Derry to prove to the outside world what's happening, but the air is too toxic for the policeman by that point, and he is killed and the old man captured; and finally and least promising, Gardener, the drunk who was actually introduced at the beginning of the novel, and who, despite being immune thanks to also a plate in his head, goes along with the Tommyknockers because he wants to use the alien technology to free the world from nuclear power. To Gardener's credit, he at least manages to hijack the saucer at the end and strand the Tommyknockers on Earth, but the fact that it takes nearly the whole novel for him to wise up and realize how dangerous the aliens and their technology is is frustrating. Especially since he's partly responsible for foiling the old man's plans, and since part of his realization came from the constable blowing herself up. I have to wonder how things might have gone differently if Gardener had managed to work with the other protagonists earlier on, if maybe some of the town could have been prevented from transforming into full Tommyknocker, if only Gardener had stopped getting drunk literally the whole novel. The whole situation just felt incredibly hopeless for most of the read.
It's interesting how King took a plot that sounds like it should be science fiction (a crashed flying saucer is exposed and starts turning the town into aliens), and writes it very much as a horror novel. It's the transformation of both the Havenites's bodies and minds that do it. The physical changes are bad enough, but it's the mental changes that really horrify. The people in the town, despite their new telepathy and ability to invent amazing machines, almost become childlike in their unquestioning devotion to excavating the saucer. As the human parts of their brains get dominated more and more by Tommyknocker-minds, their ability to question their own actions vanishes, and they are driven fully by the impulses planted in their minds to keep outsiders away, to get the ship out of the ground, to keep inventing dangerous technologies. And where most alien species in sci-fi stories are defined by cultural development, the history of their species, and the character traits of individuals, the final revelation of the mysterious Tommyknockers is that they lack culture, individual identities, and even history, since they seem to propagate themselves through the mechanism of their ships transforming other sentient species into copies of themselves. It's strongly hinted that the development of technologies gives them an overwhelming rush of euphoria from some endorphin-like molecule, and this addictive drive to create things has driven their species to pursue that, and only that, at the cost of any moral ability to question the risks that technology poses, and any ability to respect other members of their species as autonomous creatures—instead, the Tommyknockers seem to inevitably end up using their own people as living batteries. Heck, they don't even have a name for themselves; they had to borrow that from reading the Tommyknocker nursery rhyme from Gardener's mind. Things like that don't matter to them. They are invention junkies, and they always need another fix.
There are actually a fair number of inconsistencies in the middle of the novel. Different people seem to transform at strangely arbitrary rates. The "shed people" who expose themselves to a Tommyknocker computer in Bobbi Anderson's shed are supposed to change at a much faster rate than anyone else in town. Indeed, they are the only ones who are wholly and physically Tommyknockers at the novels end. But throughout the novel, other people seem to completely lose the humanity in their minds before others; in particular, Bobbi herself still has to fight against her feelings for Gardener right up until the very final days before she tries to kill him. It seems like Bobbi should have lost her human mind the fastest, since she was the one who tripped over the ship in the first place and was exposed the longest. That said, this novel had me hooked. I mean, I'm a book nerd, but I rarely feel so desperate to find out how a story unfolds that I have to stop myself from flipping ahead through sheer will power, but I had to fight that urge this time around. Just very intriguing, suspenseful writing all throughout.
Pennywise makes a couple of cameos in this novel, Derry being just a couple towns away from Haven. The Tommyknockers was written only a year after It, and takes place only two years after. It's actually kind of frustrating that he brought Pennywise back so soon after; it feels like it ruins the Loser's Club's triumph at the end of It, which really felt like a final victory, considering how much Derry got destroyed during that final confrontation. I suppose it's possible that did successfully kill the Pennywise they were facing, and that the new one is one of Its/Her eggs that they failed to find and crush. It still feels kind of disappointing. It was, however, kind of amusing for Pennywise to metaphorically take the Tommyknockers down a peg. The teen who saw him had transformed so much by that point that he didn't even make it back to Haven alive, as his body could no longer survive in Earth's atmosphere. Surely the human parts of his brain/mind were fully gone by then, yet Pennywise still tried to feed on him. I guess Pennywise's powers trump the Tommyknockers!
Bobbi was an author of Westerns before encountering the flying saucer. She wrote her last novel while she still had human parts to her mind, but then promptly stopped caring about her writing, and never tried to get it published. That means that I have an unexpected mission to perform, in the name of a certain New Caledonian Museum . . .
. . . Which will have to wait until my next spot of free time, because I need to leave for work now.
—doctorlit, eager to see the lengths Sues must go to in order to invade this story
If you haven't read, then don't you dare look! This post contains spoilers for the Tommyknocker book! If you haven't read, then don't you dare look! This post contains spoilers for the Tommyknocker book!
Or a title very similar to that. It wouldn't all fit. Spoilers for pretty much the entire Kingdom Hearts series. I’m specifically looking at Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover and Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage-. Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance was also included on the disc, but I had previously played that on 3DS.
Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover
This is a movie detailing the very earliest parts of the KH timeline. I hadn’t played the mobile phone game it was based on, so it was wholly new information to me.
At the outset of the film, the main focus for me was gleaning what info I could about the details the Master of Masters had left his six apprentices. I was put pretty quickly ill at ease by the slightly manic and aloof mannerisms of the Master—his voice actor did an incredible job of toeing the line between clearly lying scheming and questionably real goofiness—and by the suspicions that were quickly piling up between the five active apprentices. For a while, I did get suckered into thinking that one of them was a traitor—I was suspecting either Jaguar Mask Boy What Investigates Mysteries or Unicorn Mask Man What Is the Leader—but at the point it finally revealed that the info Jaguar Mask had was not taken by him to hide his own treachery, but had been given to him by the Master to ferret out treachery, that I really figured out what was going on. The Master had set them all up to be suspicious of each other. Not only did he suspect that the prophesied Keyblade War couldn’t be prevented, as he had said at the beginning of the movie, but he was actively trying to cause it.
As riveting as it was up to that point, things got even more ridiculous with the final scene. I had been questioning how the Master had gotten a book that foretold the entire future. The fact that it told of the Keyblade War gave it at least some credence, since we know that event took place in KH history. But the revelation that the Master himself wrote it turns everything on its head, because now we’re dealing with an in-universe unreliable narrator: either the foretold traitor incident was made up wholesale to sow distrust among his apprentices, or he was simply writing of his own betrayal of them at the point in history when it would actually manifest consequences. The fact that the eye symbol we’ve been seeing on various weapons throughout the entire series has actually been an augury to spy on the future all along was a little shocking, as it had seemed like nothing but a decorative motif up to this point. It also, however, makes me question where the writers are actually going with this. What’s the implication, if any, that someone who presumably died over nine hundred years in the past has been spying on the events of the rest of the series? Is it simply to confirm that the “seven lights vs. thirteen darknesses” prophecy has merit? Is the Master going to have some influence on Kingdom Hearts III, despite having lived a thousand years previous? Are they setting up a future plot line, since KH3 is said to be the end of the “Xehanort saga,” but not the end of the series as a whole?
Despite all the questions it opens up, it was a good movie. Using the animal masks was smart, as it makes it a lot easier to keep track of the characters, and they all had stupid, stupid names. The voice actors were all good choices who suited their roles well.
Kingdom Hearts 0.2 Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage-
Aqua is one of my favorite characters in the series, so getting a solo adventure to herself, even if it wasn’t quite a full-length game, is most excellent. I’m amused by the fact that it starts her out at level 50, reflecting all her experiences in her original game. Due to the (mostly) lack of other actual characters in the Realm of Darkness, the programmers had no humanoid villains to use as enemies (other than Aqua’s own reflection in the Magic Mirror), but they did a good job of designing all the Heartless to be threatening enough to require you to stay on your toes in every fight. Heck, even the familiar Darkside boss, from the original KH, gets quite a bit of presence as they lurk in the background of the Enchanted Dominion area. And I never would have guessed that throwing a bunch of basic Shadows into a pile and calling it a boss would be very threatening, but man, that final boss was thrilling as heck.
And few characters also means few allies to converse with, but the writers and Aqua’s voice actor did a good job of expressing her slow descent into hopelessness through the infrequent moments when Aqua speaks or thinks to herself. It’s also heartbreaking when she finally meets Mickey near the end of the game, and learns she’s been trapped in the Realm for nearly a decade. While her despair throughout the game was realistic in her circumstances, it felt really good for her older confidence and drive to come back at the end. I also like, though, that the incident with her reflection made her realize that her heart was vulnerable to darkness as well. Aqua had some moral absoluteness issues in her original appearance (willing to attack Cinderella’s wicked stepfamily, for example), and it implied that she was unable to sense the darkness-to-light ratio in people she had spent a lot of time and around and was used to, presumably including herself. I’ve always, therefore, assumed that Aqua assumed she had a heart of pure light, even though canonically that’s only possible for Ventus and the Princesses of Heart. So I do think it’s important for her character going forward that she recognized even her heart had aspects that the forces of darkness could overpower.
I feel like I should have seen it coming earlier than I did, but it was still a very fun surprise when the plot went full Rogue One and bumped up against the ending of the original KH. It’s awesome actually getting to see what Mickey was up to while he was offscreen, and awesome to get some limited control on a real Destiny Islands map once again, rather than just the Sora’s memory version or the data version. It’s maybe a little silly in retrospect that Riku somehow didn’t notice all the commotion behind him while he was running towards the door, and I think the timing is a little off between Riku reaching the door and Mickey appearing, but whatever. As an Aqua fan, I endorse retconning things to let her have a hand in the initial game’s victory.
And I am very excited for KH3 now, and can’t wait to see how this initial storyline gets tied up.
—doctorlit 4D: sequel prequel midquel sidequel Poetic Emotional Metaphor in Nongrammatical Punctuation HD Cinematic: Electric Boogaloo Z: The Rebootening
"Only your heart is hollow enough to be a spoiler." "Only your heart is hollow enough to be a spoiler." "Only your heart is hollow enough to be a spoiler.”
Author's Note: This kept getting longer and longer. I think I may eventually expand this into a longer interlude, but for now, I just want to post what I have. I'm falling disastrously far behind on free time stuff this week. Unbetad.
"Coming Knocking"
As Jim Gardener was entering the shed outside to talk to the living batteries imprisoned there, a thin blue portal opened in Bobbi Anderson's kitchen. Agent Doc slid through quickly, his hand already on the button to punch it closed once he was through. For safety's sake, he had first portaled to one of the dead worlds touched by Orannis in the Old Kingdom universe before coming here. He would go through a different one on the back to HQ. Those planets no longer had any atmosphere; the electromagnetic particles that slipped through the portals would disperse harmlessly into the vaccuum, and only a very insignificant number of the molecules would follow him back home.
Hopefully. The fewer the better.
Doc had set the portal into the kitchen to be as far away from Gardener as he could be, just in case he had noticed the flash of blue. This was no fanfiction; Doc was now right in the canon setting, and there was no room to screw up, no option of letting events be disrupted.
The drawback to starting in the kitchen, however, was that Doc got a much too close-up view of the body that had once belonged to Bobbi Anderson. The body, burned and bloody thanks to Jim Gardener’s actions not long before, that clearly hadn't been human for quite some time now.
Reading King's descriptions of a Tommyknocker didn't do any justice to seeing one in the translucent flesh. Doc gasped, but then mentally reprimanded himself for doing so. The oxygen tank strapped around his back wouldn't last forever, and he had needed it before even getting here, in the airless world destroyed by Orannis. Doc hurried around the body and out of the kitchen.
In Bobbi's living room, Doc forced himself to ignore the various machines and gadgets Bobbi had installed under the influence of the Tommyknocker-mind that had invaded hers. Despite being cobbled together from batteries and eighties technology, their undeniably futuristic nature made for a weird contrast with the homey wooden construction of the living room, and its worn-out couch.
It was the desk against one wall that Doc sought. What looked like an old-fashioned typewriter sat there; it only looked that way, because anyone with a Tommyknocker's telepathy could run it without touching the keys. How far away had Bobbi said she could still use it? Five miles?
But thinking of that distance reminded Doc of the other time limit he had to keep in mind. Long before his oxygen ran out, nearly every Tommyknocker in Haven would be bearing down on this farm, having felt Bobbi's psychic screaming when Gard murdered her. Not long after, this house would be going up in flames. And that was why he had come, to rescue . . .
There. Next to the typewriter. The Buffalo Soldiers. Bobbi Anderson's final novel, written while she piloted a levitating piece of construction equipment in the forest behind her house, excavating a flying saucer.
The unpublished
unbetad
manuscript sat there, a stack of computer paper almost as thick as Doc's palms. He picked up the pile and carefully wedged it under his arm. He was terrified of the prospect of even one precious page slipping out of his grip, but he wanted the manuscript already in his hands when he opened the portal. The fewer molecules of this polluted air that followed him through, the better.
Which is why he was so distracted by the two sounds that started as he got the pages firmly and lovingly nestled into the crook of his arm. One was a sputtering old truck engine. Freeman Moss, the first of the former humans-turned Tommyknocker who would come to attack Gardener, had already arrived, much faster than Doc had expected. The fire would be catching soon.
The second was a female voice in Doc's head that said, Honestly, I don't know that it's worth saving.
Doc froze in place, and felt a chill creep up and down his spine. He thought of all the things that might have gone wrong.
A leak in the air pack somewhere I've been breathing the air this whole time and now I'm "becoming" one of them I can never go back to HQ now—
Hold on, there, admonished the voice. It's not you, and it's not them, this is just me. The old and unimproved, as Gard would say.
Then, Freeman Moss's mental voice interrupted, broadcasting to Gardener outside: Looks like Bobbi put at least one good one into you, you snake. It really was close to hearing someone talk, that Tommyknocker telepathy. Loud, and impossible to ignore. Different from hearing an Andalite's thought-speech, and different from the thoughts of Bobbi's ghost just now.
A ghost? I don't know about that, kid. There's been a lot of weird mind stuff going on in this town lately—although I suspect you know all about that, somehow. I think being psychic these last few months has let my mind last a little longer than my brain, if you can dig it. And I've got to tell ya, it's real good to think for myself again.
Doc mumbled around the mouthpiece of his breathing apparatus; really, he didn't know what to say. Bobbi's ghost—or at least, what he had thought of as her ghost while he had been reading—had indeed appeared to keep Gardener safe a couple of times right at the end of the novel, before eventually fading away. But Doc wasn't prepared to encounter her like this. And without a physical body, the neuralyzer Doc had brought along just in case wasn't going to accomplish anything.
I didn’t quite catch that. I'm not as good at reading minds as I was an hour ago, and that hick yelling at Gard out there doesn't help. But I think I got the jist of it. You didn't want anyone seeing you, and you think I'm trouble now. Well, don't sweat it, all right? I have a feeling I'm not going to be around much longer—wouldn't exactly want this to be a permanent set-up, anyway. All I care about now is Gard. But listen: that novel you got there? That’s not mine. I didn’t write it. The Tommyknockers did. The old and unimproved Bobbi Anderson never could have written anything that good, especially not in three weeks.
As Doc mulled over her words, a green light bloomed out in the dooryard. The light was bright, but the green was a sick and dirty one, and Doc closed his eyes against it. Soon after, he flinched and hugged The Buffalo Soldiers to his chest as Freeman Moss’s mental screams slammed into him. Straining to focus on his words against the not-quite-a-sound, Doc concentrated on his thoughts, trying to make them as clear as possible for Bobbi. That’s bullcrap, Mrs. Anderson, and you know it! The Tommyknocker that was in your body admitted it! They can make things work, but they don’t understand why things work. They’re only intelligent, not smart. They ran this entire town on batteries! You think creatures like that could write an entire novel? They aren’t capable of creativity, Mrs. Anderson. That was you. Freeman’s screams finally died down, as did the green light outside. Doc relaxed and thought his words more calmly. It was you. The Tommyknockers may have made the telepathic typewriter, they may have buzzed your brain to make you work yourself to death, but they couldn’t have created a story. Only you could have done this. He held the manuscript out in both hands, displaying the thickness—not that he had any clue where Bobbi actually was, so to speak. This right here is Roberta Anderson. And I’m here to make sure it survives this day.
Outside, the fuel tank of Bobbi’s truck exploded. It wouldn’t be long now.
Well, all right, then. You do whatever you want. But . . . just make sure, if it does get published, you keep that dedication page intact. He’s been a good friend to me. I’m going after him now, see if I can’t still be some kind of friend to him.
You’ve got it, Doc said. But somehow, he knew that whatever part of Bobbi Anderson he had speaking with was no longer there to hear it.
Next, it was Freeman’s truck’s turn to blow. Bits of flaming debris began to drift against the front of the house, and through the open door.
Doc carefully settled the manuscript into the crook of his arm again, then he took an unexpectedly ragged breath and frowned. I wasn’t supposed to stop for a chat, he thought. It was supposed to be a quick in-and-out, and they gave me just enough oxygen for that..
He moved away from the front door. A couple of objects in the living room had already ignited. His eyes focused on the RA, he very carefully and deliberately typed in the coordinates to the second of Orannis’s victims, despite his breathing growing more difficult. There was no time for errors now. A thin portal edged open. He slid through and immediately closed it, cutting himself off from Haven’s polluted air for, he hoped, the last time in his PPC career.
This world looked identical to Orannis’s other victim Doc had passed through on the way to the Stephen King world. The air back in Haven was toxic, and would have killed Doc on the spot if he had breathed much at all. But here, there was no atmosphere at all, and the danger of the oxygen tank running out was just as real. Still, Doc trekked across the dead world, getting as far away as he could from the spot where he had opened the portal out of Haven. The fewer molecules of Haven air that followed him back to HQ, the better for everyone.
He marched across that rock, listening to his breathing grow more and more strained as the tank’s supply grew thin. He already had the RA set to portal back to Medical Research’s quarantine room. Once Doc took his first completely empty breath, he clicked it open and slid through, then closed it. Dizziness was just beginning to cloud his mind as he yanked the breather out of his mouth. He drew in a full and wonderful breath.
He knew the MRD scientists would already be remotely monitoring the room’s atmosphere, and Doc’s own biology, for contamination. That was fine. He could wait. He had a way to pass the time. He lay down on the generic floor and set The Buffalo Soldiers down, neatly patting the edges of the stack until all the papers were perfectly squared. He turned the title page over and laid it face down next to the rest of the pile. He then did the same with the dedication page, which read so appropriately:
For Gard, who’s always there when I need him.
* * *
Author's Note: I hope this doesn't reek too much of "PPC agent chumming it up with a canon character." When I got the idea for this, I was expecting it to be much shorter, but I just kept uncovering more as I wrote. Bobbi's "ghost" or whatever does vanish from the narrative soon after the point in time when this story takes place, so I don't think the lack of neuralyzation is an issue. The Buffalo Soldiers is of course destined for la Musée des Univers Perdus. (I know it's not from a lost civilization, but it is lost, eh?) The novel's dedication is taken directly from the narrative in The Tommyknockers.
—doctorlit
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Stephen King said of The Tommyknockers:
I've thought about it a lot lately and said to myself, "There's really a good book in here, underneath all the sort of spurious energy that cocaine provides, and I ought to go back." The book is about 700 pages long, and I'm thinking, "There's probably a good 350-page novel in there."
Here is the full interview for those interested:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/stephen-king-the-rolling-stone-interview-20141031
I mean, I was still enthralled by it. Admittedly, from a conciseness/directness standpoint, there are a lot of vignettes in the middle section of the book that don't have direct bearing on the outcome of the novel, about random townspeople. But I felt that helped to flesh out the setting more, and gave an idea of the scope of the changes affecting the town. Some of the information provided from that section led me to guess some information about the Tommyknockers's nature before the reveal at the end, and I'm typically bad at figuring things out on my own before a novel reveals them. So I don't think there's much I would like to see cut out, personally.
—doctorlit, watching water boil
I think it partially comes down to it having been written during the cocaine phase of his career. You can notice a certain autobiographical element in some of his works of that era: doesn't his line about "spurious energy" sound like what the alien ship gives people?
Gives them energy, but also slowly killing them and making their health deteriorate. And affects their minds, and substitutes their will with an outside influence's power. And the source of the problem is an inanimate object.
Wow, that runs deep. And here I thought it was all a metaphor for over-reliance on nuclear power.
—doctorlit is bad at reading beyond the text
I think a message against nuclear power would be strange, as there are only 99 (https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics) nuclear power plants in the USA, and only a few reactors in the world have ever melted down.
Gardener's main motivation is his fear of the health effects of nuclear power plant operation. It's the only reason he goes along with helping the Tommyknockers—he feels that the technologies they develop will provide a safer source of power for the world. By the end, of course, he finally realizes that their tech can be used violently, just like human tech can, and that the Tommyknockers's original social structure got broken down through their irresponsible use of it. Gardener constructs a rhyme about it that sums it up pretty well:
"I had a perfectly good reason to raise this fuss
I met the Tommyknockers, and they were us."
—doctorlit
My point was just that I don't think nuclear power is a significant threat to humanity.
Anyway, at some point in his career Stephen King was on: Valium , Cocaine, Cough Syrup (seriously), and a large amount of alcohol, to the point where he got drunk on mouthwash (Scrope, to be exact). Note the large number of alcoholics who work their way into his books. All of this is thought to the reason why he doesn't remember writing Cujo or the production of Maximum Overdrive. This is all the information I have on the subject.