Anvil of Cheese

I love musing about how I would direct the movie and what the soundtrack would contain. Example: Greg Bear's Anvil of Stars, sequel to The Forge of God. I don't absolutely love Forge, but Anvil is one of the two greatest sci-fi revenge tales - the other being Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination. Anvil has an atmosphere of melancholy, fierce stoicism. Yes, it's sentimental Spielberg child-cult, in an Ender's Game sort of way - yet cerebrally chilling, too, in a Count of Monte Cristo to the tenth power sort of way. A solemn vendetta pursued across millions of years and light-years, only to find ... well, don't let me spoil it.

So, in a Platonic spirit, I need music for the soundtrack - both violent and voluntary. The Ship of The Law hangs solemnly in space, barely moving relative to its origin and unknown destination. It's orphaned crew of battered and dauntless avengers rest or stand like sentries; few in number and fewer over time, mauled and maddened by fiendish solar system-sized traps beyond their comprehension. They are pawns, sacrificed as children to buy the deaths of all the murderers of the earth.

As this not-so-favorable review puts it:

If it sounds all a bit dour and heavy going, it is. Anvil of Stars is as weighty as its title implies. The story is overburdened at times by its own gravitas, and while it's never anything less than intelligent and sensitive in depicting the odyssey of its characters, it is a story more easily admired than enjoyed.

Me? I couldn't put it down. So, anyway, I settled on Radiohead's "Pyramid Song", off of Amnesiac. "Jumped in the river, what did I see?/Blackheart angel swam with me". I thought that the opening bars - the simple piano, the mournful high 'ooooh, ooooowooh' cooing - would accompany a languid, slow, chilly crawl shot over the massive ship crawling through space; then, faces of the crew, impassive, still and set - portraits of loss and grim resolve.

Turns out someone else had exactly the same idea for a soundtrack. Well, it's not quite the story I had in mind, but the mood is exactly the same. You should really watch part 1 & part 2 first, just as you should read Forge of God first.

Serves me right for liking to be overburdened by child-cult gravitas, plus all the E-Z push emotional buttons of revenge melodrama - like someone went and dropped a three-hundred pound wheel of cheese on my silly head. Oh, well. There you go.

Comments

[Chun the Unavoidable]

I always imagined Exile on Main Street as Bear's sort of concept album- for Anvil. It, to me, captures the boozy nihilism of that novel better than even Rush's OU812.

[Adam Kotsko]

Have you ever seen the actual video for "Pyramid Song"? If not, it's worth checking out.

The best video ever is for Sigur Ros's "Track 3" off the parentheses album. It can be viewed here.

[Gojira]

OU812 was Van Halen. Do you mean 2112?