mataglap -- an Indonesian word meaning "dark eye" or, probably, "dilated eye." It is an indication that someone is about to go berserk and start killing people at random. Used in Walter Jon Williams' novel Aristoi as the name of a berserk form of nanotechnology that devoured the planet.

You can e-mail Mataglap SF at mataglap@yahoo.com

 
(published by Tachyon)


Published as a short novel, Morrow's latest work follows on from his more accessible style in which he engages the reader with some wry, quirky characterizations plunked down into a unique situation that is very real to them but somewhat allegorical or satirical to the rest of us.  Here he's absorbed much of what there is to know about low budget horror and monster movies of the golden age of filmmaking, with a number of cameo appearances by real people, including James Whale, who directed the first iconic Frankenstein movie.

The story concerns aging B-movie star Syms Thorley, who in the recent past is writing his memoirs from a hotel where he is a guest of a monster movie fan convention, receiving an award for his career achievements.  The narrative gives him the opportunity to reveal some secret history of his movie career while at the same time exorcising a few demons while he tries to decide whether to kill himself or not.  Morrow easily shifts forward between the present and the story Thorley is writing about, which concerns his duty during World War II in helping the government convince the Japanese that the US military was on verge of unleashing giant reptiles against their shores.  The G-men have the somewhat uncharacteristically humane idea that it would be preferable to convince the enemy of the destructive potential of this threat without having to actually deploy it, so they enlist Syms to recreate his reknowned performance as Gorgantis for a government-produced movie, directed  by Whale, which would then be shown to Japanese representatives as though it were evidence of the real monsters destroying a city.  Syms is bemused by the whole idea, but as an actor rises to the challenge.

Where Morrow seems to be going with this is contrasting this somewhat ridiculous secret project to the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb, although Syms' memoir doesn't really spend too much time drawing parallels between them.  The movie is made (in fact it's hardly even a movie at all as it seems to play out in real time to the Japanese emissaries as it is being filmed), the results are mixed, and the war plays out pretty much the way we remember.  The main dramatic moment comes when his archrival in the B-movie business tries to hold him hostage for the rights to what he thinks is a new movie monster, but it seems kind of pointless to the action, although it does illustrate a fateful turn in Syms' career.  In the present story, Syms has introspective encounters with a hooker and a hotel bellhop, to whom he tries to give away the meager amount of worldy goods he has in his possession there. 

But in the end what the reader is supposed to make of this entertaining but somewhat aimless story is left open to interpretation.  If Syms is speaking for western civilization, then are we to conclude that his best effort to bring peace through intimidation was doomed to fall short, and that dropping the bomb was the "least bad" way to end the war?  In the present there seems to be more revisionist views of those events and whether destroying Hiroshima was really necessary, but one way to look at this book is that we were moving towards something on that scale of horror with some level of inevitability.  Unleashing the real giant reptiles carried some degree of risk too because there was no guarantee they could be completely controlled and end up turning on the rest of the world.  There's also a certain sense of nostalgia here for this somewhat more innocent time where what we thought of then as horror depicted in the old movies didn't really prepare us for what happened during World War II, and at the same time paved the way for all the post-war Japanese angst and self-doubt that manifested itself in decades of their monster movies.  Morrow ends up with a very worthwhile story, both humorous and poignant by turns and well worth checking out, even if the end result is a little more mellow than you might expect.
posted by Mark at 10:19 PM