I have been enjoying Ekaterina Sedia's Secret History of Moscow and finding it wonderful reading. I have no idea how this is going to end but what has impressed me thus far is the seamless way Sedia blends her mythic elements. You have old myths, such as the rusalki and kikimora, that are side by side with modern myths, such as the wife of a Decembrist. One moment there is a meeting with Father Frost and the next a discussion of the Vavilov Institute and Trofim Lysenko. Sedia has done so much homework to make an appropriately modern urban fantasy about Russia and I am deeply impressed. This could not have been an easy book to write and yet it reads as if it is - perhaps one of the biggest compliments I can pay a writer.

I've been thinking about modern myths quite a bit lately, especially since I saw a brief mention at Ed's about Jon Krakauer writing a book called The Hero (or not writing it as the article explains). I've written about my displeasure of Into the Wild before, not because I think Krakauer is a bad writer (he's a great writer) but because of his habit of becoming too emotionally attached to his nonfiction subjects - to the detriment of truth. As the author was so willing to make a hero out of Chris McCandless, I can only imagine what lengths he might go to for others who are part of a book on the very subject of heroics. This of course makes me wonder why we (as a culture) seem to choose the heroes we do, and the lengths we will go to in order to hide the truth about those we choose.

Chris McCandless is particularly frustrating for me because everything we did at the Company was about surviving in the wilderness - it was about making the wilderness survivable. That was the whole point of early aviation in Alaska. Right now I'm writing the last couple of pages about the wilderness and flying and the demand for heroics at the drop of a hat. It's interesting how no one can name anyone who reached the peak of Mt McKinley, let alone the pilot who is credited with saving more climbers and knowing the mountain better than anyone alive (with the exception of Branford Washburn) yet everyone knows the guy who walked off the highway near Denali and starved to death.

Let me write that again - he walked off the highway and starved to death.

The only reason McCandless is a hero is because Jon Krakauer made him one. Millions of people are impressed with him because one man was impressed with him. And then he didn't tell the truth when he wrote his book, just so you would love his hero even more.

This is the masterful creation of a modern myth but in the most skewed manner imaginable - take the frontier myth of survival, the heroic myth of overcoming a great difficulty and bringing a boon back to the "village" and mix both into the tale of a foolish young man who died through his own lack of preparedness. The only gift he has is the story of his completely avoidable failure. In the last century we had cowboys and astronauts, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Now we have death from starvation mere miles from a highway. My how things have changed.

[Post pic of St George & the dragon, of course.]