Over the years, Roger Zelazny has been the most reviewed author on this blog (see previous thoughts on Amber, Lord Of Light and This Immortal), which is odd because while I like his work I don't necessarily love it.
I may find him easy to write about because many of his interests - pop psychology, mythology, religion - coincide with my own. I also like the way his allusiveness - rich descriptions and deep conversations spanning the pulp architecture of his plotting - resists easy explanation.
In a way Zelazny represented the accessible end of the 'New Wave' of fantasy and SF of the late 60's and early 70's. He displays influences beyond the genre and a degree of literary experimentation, but he is a much easier entry point than fellows such as Ballard, Disch or Delany.
That said, his second novel The Dream Master (1966) is more difficult to fathom than many of his works. It follows Charles Render, a psychologist trained in the construction of healing dreams for his clients using a technowomb. Ostensibly the perfect therapist, his hubris undoes him when he attempts to give a blind woman dreams of sight.
It's a confusing book - intentionally so. Fragments of other narratives are placed alongside the main plotline, often without context. So much is hinted at, often in crucial passages that attempt to follow the logic of dreams themselves, that the reader apprehends the book as if through a glass darkly.
This gives it undeniable atmosphere. But a rushed ending in particular ultimately denies The Dream Master its potency. Zelazny himself felt the short story on which it was based did a better job, but having not read that I can't comment.
I will say that several of the supplementary narratives felt like padding (interesting, but nevertheless padding) and the one-dimensional nature of the women in the book much less easy to overlook than they might have been at the time.
Interesting enough that it begs a re-read, but flawed enough that it stands more as a statement of ambition than of craft.
When you find a gothic electro-pop album featuring in several end-of-year extreme metal best-ofs for 2017, it comes as no surprise to discover that Ulver are responsible.
Having wrapped up their Norwegian black metal phase some twenty years ago, they may have followed their own map ever since into ambient soundtracks, trip-hop, psychedelia, prog and neo-classical experiments. But as they were there at the beginnings of a genuine musical phenomenon, and since chief creative spirit Kristoffer Rygg still looks like he could holler under a blood-lit moon with the best of them if the mood ever took him that way, Ulver get lifetime genre-membership privileges.
Even though no-one knows which version of the band are going to appear from record to record and it's almost certainly not going to be metal.
To these ears, the Ulver that have turned up for The Assassination Of Julius Caesar really like: Depeche Mode circa Violator; Trevor Horn’s 80’s production work; early 90’s techno; slightly over-earnest songs about the Roman Empire; The Beloved;
The good news is that this foregrounds Rygg’s voice – Ulver’s beautiful, pure-toned trump card – against sympathetic, mostly electronic instrumentation. Assassination is the closest they’ve come to pop since their 2012 psychedelic covers set Childhood’s End, although given that much of their output since then has been freeform jamming this isn’t necessarily saying much.
And granted, the music is still brooding, jagged and lyrically focussed on matters of faith and tragedy. But now Ulver - on, say, closing track Coming Home – are doing their thing over beats not a million miles away from Crockett’s Theme from Miami Vice, which is a big plus in my book. The fussiness I can sometimes resent in their proggier work (I’m looking at you, Wars Of The Roses) is almost completely absent here.
In yr blogger’s opinion, then, Assassination is Ulver’s best, most consistent work since the austere majesty of 2007's Shadows Of The Sun. That’s another synth-heavy album and if you like, Assassination is Shadows down the alternative disco, throwing out shapes at a stately 80’s bpm.
To a hammer, all problems look like a nail.
And Maslow's Hammer is pretty much the tragedy of John Wick: Chapter 2, at least I believe that the film would have it so.
Film has adult themes, discussed below the poster.
The film, enjoyable as it is, is essentially the same as its predecessor, only bigger, flashier and more preposterous. Once again, retired hitman John Wick's unresolved grief issues are poked in a raw place; one more time his considered response is to kill everyone responsible for his pain.
I have the strongest feeling that Chapter 2 wants to present this as tragedy, in the classical sense of a great figure being undone by what what makes them 'great'. In this case, the tragedy of a man trained to kill people in a wide variety of ways whose response to personal crisis is to.... well, you get the picture.
Consider that the film goes out of its way to present John Wick as a legend. Leading lights of the criminal underworld and its international league of assassins swap stories of his exploits, indulge him, sometimes even defer to him. He's not just a gangster - he's the grieving Fisher King of hitmen, mourning the death of his wife (and the pup from film one) and now the destruction of his house to boot.
And consider too, that a perfectly cast Keanu Reeves owns this 'still waters run deep' schtick like no-one else in the business. The film is asking you to root for him, just a little, even if only by comparison to everyone else in the film.
The problem with setting him up as a tragic figure in the narrative is that the material can't sustain it. For
JW to be some sort of fallen samurai or antihero, there would have to be some
element of ethical struggle accompanying his actions.
But, to put it in the language of Dungeons and Dragons alignments, what we have in John Wick: Chapter 2 is a Chaotic Neutral, verging on Chaotic Evil, character taking down a Lawful Evil criminal empire, purely for personal revenge. Even when he's presented with alternative solutions that don't involve killing, he doesn't hesitate to take the direct route. And there's nothing great or tragic about that because there's no inner conflict. At best, it's just pop nihilism.
Chapter 2 is a beautifully shot and choreographed action B-movie, but it overreaches when it tries to portray its protagonist as more than what he is. And that's all I really have to say about it.
Well, it was a good joke the first time around...
[some spoilers ahead]
Brian Catling is an artist and poet who has expanded into fiction, which probably explains a lot about The Vorrh, his first novel. It's poetic, impressionistic and filtered through Catling's own interests, idiosyncracies and predilictions.
It's also a sprawling, incoherent beast of nearly 600 pages that - if it didn't astound and horrify as much as it does - would at times be ejected out the window with force.
The Vorrh of the title is a Conradian heart-of-darkness rainforest in a fantastic colonial Africa, the name borrowed from Raymond Roussel's 1910 avant-garde travelogue Impressions of Africa. Roussel himself features in the book as one of the main characters, under the reductive alias of The Frenchman.
The forest is a place of revelation, mysterity and insanity, as well as a source of income for the settlers of Essenwald, the timber town at its edge. Catling uses both as a common thread for five overlapping stories, although one of them, concerning Victorian photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge is barely Vorrh-related at all and seems almost to be a palimpsest of an earlier work.
Well, I did mention this was a sprawling effort, didn't I?
It might be written in the fantastic mode, including magical weapons, angels, wise women, mythical beasts and cyclopses (Catling loves him a cyclops), but The Vorrh is a long way from the genre mainstream, however it's been marketed. Far better points of reference for the reader are gothic horror and magic realism, both of which I'm fortunately very much down with.
For a couple of good reasons, this is one of those books I dare say I will end up reading again. First, there are some plotlines in The Vorrh which
are beautifuly told, working as short stories (existential horror,
usually) in the broader narrative. The sections involving Roussel, making a
creative pilgramage to the forest, are universally good.
Second, there's a lot going on here, as you might expect from a professor and polymath like Catling. He's happy to throw in a reference to this or that esoteric, technological or historical datum every few pages, such that I inevitably didn't get them all first time around.
But, and you have probably sensed some buts on the way throughout this review, this is one of those books where the author is clearly throwing a lot at the wall and seeing what sticks. Not all of it does - the dream monologue of the dog is a particularly low point, and generally the sex is your average bad literary sex. The prose too, verges on the purple at times; Catling's poetic instinct to try and knock every sentence out of the park is endearing, but not every description, not every metaphor works.
Not much of the plot is wrapped up by the end either. The presentation of the Vorrh as a part one of a trilogy might be more commercial contrivance than fact, and I suspect we're probably dealing with one epic 2,000 page novel here.
Tropes and traps
It's also hard to not write about The Vorrh and not address the challenges inherent in writing an 'African fantasy' from a white European perspective. To his credit, Catling rises to the challenge: his perspective is pretty clearly anti-colonial, and to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge no specific cullture is being bowdlerised in the name of fiction. The strand of the novel involving Roussel is a good critique of literary tourism, among the many other things that it is.
So a lot of obvious traps are avoided. Yet there are still problematic tropes here, in particularly the use of the forest and its inhabitants as a stand-in for the African Other: mysterious, magical, dangerous and unknowable. Catling isn't immune from cliche in his African magic either, and his use of a white character who goes native in one of the stories makes sense in context but is a bit of a tired substitution. Plus, the only black protagonist a) is a bit of a bad 'un b) is impressed into servitude c) dies.
None of which to say that The Vorrh isn't a good book, in some places an excellent one, nor to say that Catling isn't aware of the issues - I believe he is and has tried to make sure the novel includes its own critique of these stereotypes. But this may be a sticking point for some readers - each of which will reach their own judgement as to how much he gets the balance right.
I've
greatly enjoyed both of Becky Chambers' books so far, primarily because of
their warmth, their concern with everyday life in an interstellar
future, and their concern with human (and non-human) relationships.
And it's no coincidence that A Closed And Common Orbit is the only one of the Hugo-nominated novels I can see being adapted for the big or the little screen, as these are much more common traits of SF film and television than they are of novels and short-stories.
Orbit is a spin-off from its predecessor, The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, following several of its supporting characters: Sidra, a starship's AI now hiding in an illegal android body and Pepper, the gadgeteer acting in loco parentis for her. It follows both Sidra's attempts to find a place for herself in a new and confusing world planetside, while also telling Pepper's backstory as a young refugee from a backwater colony built on genetic manipulation.
So, it's a double Bildungsroman, or less pretentiously, a coming of age story, a YA novel in adult clothing. And I mean that last as a compliment - both Orbit and Planet are about young people making their way in a confusing universe, learning life lessons and looking for somewhere to fit in and belong.
And while fantasy turns out young adventurers by the score, SF has lost the art of this somewhat in recent years and it's nice to see Chambers do an good job of redressing the balance. Her work is very well suited as a gateway into the wider genre.
So, it's an enjoyable read, but is it the best book on the Hugo shortlist? In a way, Orbit has the opposite problem to Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit, which is hard to truly like but easy to respect. Chambers give us memorable characters, snappy dialogue and moves the plot along smoothly - in short, she gives us fun - but these are all virtues of writerly craft rather than of art. And you've got to have both.
The themes she explores - artitificial intelligence and a genetically modified underclass - aren't particularly new or refreshed either. And the climax of the book is also somewhat underplayed, given how emotionally invested in the outcome the reader should be by that point.
Another way of putting it is that while there is much good in it, even the every good in places, Orbit isn't quite the complete package. For me, it also lacks the uncanny superlative (that Bill and Ted 'Woah' factor) that in different ways characterises the best of both SF and fantasy.
A Hugo nomination for what is still only Chambers' second novel reflects how far she's already come, however, and I look forward to reading (or indeed watching) more by her in the future.
Hugo Rankings So Far
1. Charlie Jane Anders, All The Birds In The Sky
2. Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit
3. Becky Chambers, A Close And Common Orbit
I've seen a great deal of appreciation in some quarters of the internet for Yoon Ha Lee's Hugo-nominated debut novel Ninefox Gambit. Me, I'm still trying to decide if I actually liked it or not.
Now, likeability isn't necessarily a sign of a great book, but if it's not aimiable it has to have other things going for it. And what Ninefox Gambit does have is a great idea: that of a totalitarian regime consciously shaping its own consensus reality through control of philosophy, physics and mathematics; right down to the calendar and how time is measured.
This might seem far fetched, until we recall revolutionary France's new calendar which renamed the months and introduced a ten day week, or the Cambodian Year Zero. Control of time, of information, of language is something we are all too familiar with from the last century.
Lee simply takes this to a logical endpoint. And then goes right over the edge with the idea that mass belief can generate special combat effects like something out of a role-playing game (or the human machine code of Snow Crash, or Julian May's psychic protagonists combining their powers in metaconcert).
Needless to say, there is something of a tension between the serious and the silly in Ninefox Gambit.
As a story, it plays out as philosophical military SF - a war of competing ideologies, but also of guns and ships powered by those same beliefs. There are scads of space battles, close-quarter fighting and political intrigue here to enjoy.
My reservations? It's not as sure footed in its storytelling or world-building as it thinks it is, and could do with a wee bit more exposition. Tonally, it's all over the place too, with ill-fitting comic moments not really working in a much grimmer bigger picture.
But having said that, Ninefox Gambit is a novel I'd like to think I would have published had I the opportunity - it may not be likeable but it sure is interesting. It's a calling card for a new talent and I'll certainly read it again, if only to get a better handle on it.
When we were driving through rural California back in 2015 on the way to Yosemite, we were struck by how easy it would be to just disappear in the vastness of America.
Dropping out in Britain is compromised (with the possible exception of northern Scotland) by population density - the counterculture is social by necessity as much as by inclination. In the US, there's little to prevent you going full Walden, if that's what you want.
And in last year's film Captain Fantastic, that's exactly what Ben and Leslie Cash thought they wanted.
NB mild spoilers and mention of mental illness and suicide follow.
Turning their back on the dominant culture, they raise their six children in deep seclusion in the forested fastness of Washington state. Their aim: to raise philosophers and athletes in the style of the Ancient Greeks, able to cite the Bill of Rights as readily as they can run miles through the forest.
Writer/director Matt Ross manages the feat of taking this project as seriously as they do themselves, while also acknowledging the comedy inherent in a family who give their children one-of-a-kind new age names (Vespyr, Rellian, Bodevan) and celebrate Noam Chomsky Day in lieu of Christmas.
Captain Fantastic is a film about the collapse of this rural utopian dream through the mental illness and death of mother Leslie and the family's resulting, reluctant but pragmatic compromise with American society. Rugged, brooding, heartfelt - though not without lightness of touch - it's a very Viggo Mortensen kind of film.
And he excels himself in the lead role of grieving patriarch Ben Cash, driving down to New Mexico with clan in tow to disrupt Leslie's (profoundly, inappropriately traditional) funeral. A kind of Swiss Family Roadtrip, if you like. The kids are great too, played by the juvenile cast with just the right mix of precocity, naivete and presumption you'd expect of children raised by latter-day Rousseaus.
The film walks a nice line between critiquing the idea that one can change the world simply by retreating and raising the next generation apart from it, while also showing up the limits and ignorance of modern techno-culture. It doesn't trade on broad strokes or easy answers though; it's a small film about parents with big ideas and is all the better for it.
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes describes the condition of man before laws, before government, as a war of all against all. Life in this state of nature was 'nasty, brutish and short.'
This is also a pretty good summary of Koushun Takami's Battle Royale, except for the short part: the novel (in a new translation) is over 600 pages along.
Actually, the world of Battle Royale is a Leviathan simulating a state of nature, as the book sees an authoritarian Japan's ruling elite get its kicks by letting armed high school students loose on an island and ordering them to kill each other or be killed by explosive collars around their necks.
Whether this is also a safety valve for the regime or just an arbitrary exercise of power is never entirely resolved. Takami's characters try both ideas on for size, but what do they know - they're just kids, right? The contrast here with Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy is striking, where the role of the Games as a tool of social control is very apparent.
Battle Royale also lacks its literary descendent's concerns with performance, ethics and identity. Instead, it's sex and death nearly all the way (and mostly death at that). Altruism, friendship, trust and mercy are values that the class struggle to hold onto when life becomes survival of the fittest; pretty much the only motivation that survives alongside is love or adolescent lust.
How does it read? Like a bracing jolt of nihilism as we meet each student and hear their story, often shortly before the body count increases. And viewed in those terms it's an thrilling action-driven text that allows you to overlook the functional writing (at least in translation) and stereotypical characterisation.
But Battle Royale is not just pulp teensploitation. Its rather Freudian fixation on eros and thanatos, life, death and rebirth - has something of the ritual about it. As does its repetitive nature and obsession with counting - the number of classmates remaining, the numerical ID each one has, the division of the island into grid squares, even the time of day.
Something in the concept and the delivery then, somewhere at the heart of what Takami has done here, makes for a dark energy that transcends the material itself. You might not like it what it has to say, but it's powerful nonetheless.
Big thanks to book club friends, whose discussions informed this review.
Despite my actual knowledge of The Blue Nile being limited to one brief listen a long time ago to the university library copy of Hats, look what I picked up the other day.
I bought Nileism - which is a cut above the usual music biography, by the way - more for the legend of The Blue Nile than anything else: twenty years existing in Glaswegian shadow, punctuated by only four albums and minimal touring.
With minimal participation from the three core band members Paul Buchanan, Robert Bell and P J Moore, Brown struggles to shed much light on their notoriously hermetic and glacially slow musical processes. So inevitably the book does talk a lot about the recordings themselves.
Yet in spite of this - and this is very much a tribute to the author's skill - what Nileism does deliver on is in providing a near-textbook example of the tricksy nature of creativity and the interdependency of method and results. The partnership of Buchanan, Bell and Moore, plus studio owner and engineer Calum Malcolm as enabler and facilitator, seem to have achieved painstakingly slow but successful results over the first two albums.
They formed what Brown describes, speculatively but science-fictionally, as a hivemind: a joint approach rooted in what he suggests was an uncommonly close working relationship, a sympathetic recording studio, a strong sense of place in the city of Glasgow and a record deal which firewalled them from the demands of the mainstream music industry.
When after album two these conditions gradually changed, Brown reckons, everything slowly expired: the musical results, the friendships and finally the band itself.
Of course it didn't help that none of The Blue Nile seemingly talked out their problems, but the point of this nearly-but-not-quite-a-review is to stress how important understanding your creative eco-system is for your art. Change any one factor and you risk disturbing the foundations of what you've built.
Change nothing, of course, and you risk stagnation. But that's a whole different story.
Edited to add: congratulations to The Fifth Season and N K Jemisin on their Hugo win in Best Novel!
To begin with, a prediction: one day soon N K Jemisin will write a great novel.
The Fifth Season isn't quite it, but it's such a giant step forward from anything else I've read by her that it went from 'novel I was least looking forward to on the Hugo shortlist' to a very pleasant surprise.
Everything I've read by Jemisin has always delivered conceptually, and The Fifth Season is no exception. Imagine a science-fantasy world of such tectonic instability that disaster - volcano, earthquake, tsunami, climate change, starvation - threatens on a regular basis. Where orogenes, those with the power to control the forces of the earth, are respected yet hated and feared, cossetted yet coerced into labouring for 'the greater good'.
The Fifth Season tells tales of three orogene women at different stages of their career. In the main plotline, Essun is searching for her missing daughter and infanticidal husband against the backdrop of a civilisation-ending volcanic eruption. But the novel also flashes back to Damaya's experiences of training and Syenite's unpredictable field mission with Alabaster, a seismic wunderkind with all kinds of issues.
If that sounds grim - that's because it is. It's crapsack world time again, and this is one of those novels where a good deed rarely goes unpunished. Essun, our notional protagoist, is herself a mass-murderer out of anger and perceived necessity, while the implicit body-count from the eruption begins to rival Seveneves, another novel about the end of the world.
Yet The Fifth Season is no exercise in cheap nihilism. Jemisin sets up a world which is always waiting for the hammer of natural disaster to fall and therefore must function according to an iron code - part Darwinian calculus, part inherited wisdom - in which sentiment plays no part.
And while the reader is not asked to condone the actions of orogenes driven to revolt - despised and spat upon as they are - their root causes can be easily understood, even sympathised with. You'll be unsurprised to hear that both the orogenes' situation and their response function as a fertile metaphor for anger and oppression; correspondingly the novel makes signposting nods in the direction of race and gender.
The Fifth Season doesn't offer simple parallels or didactic exercises though - these are themes not tablets of stone. It's a cracking story and a great exercise in world-building, regardless of political context.
But anger is an energy, as John Lydon pointed out some time ago. And it's anger expelled in the form of concentrated story that gives this book an edge and a boldness that lifts it above anything N K Jemisin has done before.
There's an old, old argument in science-fiction that goes a little something like this:
"You can't judge SF by the standards of literary fiction because it forms a separate tradition, two parts pulp, one part hard science. It's written for an audience with different expectations to the typical reader, who prize scientific speculation over character, action over introspection and guess what - they like it that way!"
Granted, this is often the battle cry of a subculture when someone from outside takes a dispassionate look - which is to say, a critical one - at what that community purports to value. And it's also fair to say this particular argument rests on a diminished view of what science-fiction is and has always has been - a pluralist school with at least one foot in the mainstream.
But there is a germ of truth to the suggestion that you can write a classic science-fiction novel that flouts literary conventions, that dumps scads of info left, right and centre, neglects a conventional plot in favour of engineering problems, and is happy to ignore psychological depth because the surface is where everything is going on.
Or to put it another way - SF valorises this kind of 'bad book'. And Neil Stephenson's Seveneves is one of them.
And so help me, I voted for it in the Hugo Awards as my pick for Best Novel.
Seveneves presents an artificial crisis - the destruction of the Moon rendering the Earth uninhabitable - and covers the attempt to survive by establishing a viable orbital colony before Armageddon strikes. In effect, it holds a gun to Humanity's head and says 'Space is beyond tough, but you've got to solve a long list of physics, engineering, robotics, biology and sociology problems before an immovable deadline.'
Part One: the Scientist as Hero
The first two thirds of the book are essentially about how those problems get solved, with a side order of elegy for a dying Earth. It doesn't soft-pedal on the human cost of the project either; many characters in space, never mind those on Earth, don't make it out alive.
But at its core Seveneves is hugely pro-science, confident that the application of ingenuity can solve the problems before us. Like The Martian on a macro level, you can read it as an attempt to revive for the classic 50's trope of the scientist as hero. It's not a nostalgic or sentimental novel by any means, but the positions it takes serve as a useful corrective to cultural pessimism and the seemingly endemic distrust of expertise.
The race against the clock to build a viable space colony is also gripping to read. Stephenson doesn't stint on threat, piling on problem after problem onto his hapless band of astronauts, geeks and space cadets. The fact that Seveneves maintains interest despite pages of techno-fetishistic info-dumping is tribute to the tension he creates.
Now, I am one of those who hold to the view that Stephenson has seemingly become impossible to edit, turning out one research-ridden thick book one after another. And while I tend to prefer my SF writers to be more artist than engineer, poet not plodder, I will happily concede that for Seveneves the technical content more often that not serves the plot.
Also, one can always skim the good Dr Stephenson's digressions into, say, orbital physics, secure in the knowledge that he will eventually get to the point. Which in this book is usually: Peril! Or more rarely: Solution!
Part Two: Anthropological Parlour Games
The final third of Seveneves, set thousands of years after the cataclysm, is an interesting attempt to imagine an orbital civilisation. It's hard to say more about its content without delivering massive spoilers (yes, you do find out how the book gets its name) but as a Tomorrow's World fantasy cum anthropological parlour game it diverts but inevitably lacks the spectacle of the first section.
It's not bad, but the novel does rather go off the boil at this point, with its flaws (chiefly, too much info-dumping, not enough character drama) becoming more exposed in the absence of exploding moons and such. I agree with those who've suggested it should have been ideally expanded into another book.
Attack of the Straw Politicians
One thing both halves of Seveneves have in common is a profound distrust of politics. In as far as the book has villains that aren't large moon rocks, they are straw politicians and journalists who rabble-rouse, dissemble and betray. They undermine not just the work of heroic scientists, but (dah dah DAH!) the human race itself.
Sigh.
The issue is that Stephenson's so relentlessly one-sided about his pathologically conniving vote-peddlers that his love for letting the science geeks save the day starts to look a little authoritarian in a peculiarly Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs For President sort of style. And it's frustrating when author who's clearly thought so much about the science of his novel cannot rise above the sophomoric with his cultural criticsm.
But still - a necessary book
I started out by suggesting that Seveneves was a good bad book, and I'd stand by that assessment. In fact, it's a very good bad book let down somewhat by an odd final act that should have perhaps been shunted into a sequel and the aforementioned political crudities. Stephenson's seemingly endless license to explain is again a double-edged sword but on balance this time does less harm than good.
Seveneves is also a good-but-bad-yet-necessary novel - it felt like it had to be written and the only other one you can really say that of on the Hugo shortlist is N K Jemisin's The Fifth Season. While the crisis the novel presents may be artificial, the questions it asks are very real ones: how will humanity address the crises and challenges of the twenty-first century? How will science and scientists in particular respond?To what extremes could living through a crisis bring us?
There are a number of things in Seveneves I would take issue with. But the point is that I am taking issue. I am engaging with what it has to say and it's making me think. That principle's pretty foundational to what good science-fiction should be in my world. So in a year with only a fair to middling shortlist it did enough to get the nod for Best Novel from me.
Note: Seveneves was on the Rabid Puppies voting slate that dominated the Hugo shortlist through block voting. However, to the best of my knowledge, Neil Stephenson is neither involved on the slate nor has commented publically on proceedings.
