WHAT have you finished reading recently? Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization, Bruce Thornton, and James Garfield, Ira Rutkow.
WHAT are you reading now? Just began The Unexpected President, a history of Chester Arthur. Still pecking at The Great Crusade, but I’m mostly reading it for Eisenhower’s voice.
WHAT are you reading next? Who knows? I’ve requested Truman by David McCullough via ILL, but none of my fish are biting. (The way the ILL system works is that I send in a request to five libraries; wait for each of them to say go/no go, and then try again if everyone refuses. In this case I think the sheer size of the 1200 page book is making librarians go “…I am not boxing that monster up.”) I also started reading Dan McClellan’s The Bible Says So, but we’ll see.There are always…options.
“Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning.”
Back in March, I announced that I was beginning a trio of unknowns — Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur. Then the 1960s took over, but I’m back at it. Who is James Garfield? A teacher, an officer, a forceful Republican — and a man who barred his own vice president from the White House. (John Adams probably wishes he’d thought of that — Jefferson, too!) Last of the log-cabin presidents, Garfield dreamt of becoming a sailor but only made it as far as the canals, where he decided the maritime life was not for him. An enthusiastic reader, he did well academically and was teaching lower grades before he’d even received a B.A. Although he prospered as a teacher — becoming a college president! –, it wasn’t something he wanted to do for the rest of his life; after serving as a staff officer in the Civil War (specifically, as General Rosecrans’ chief of staff), he became a force in the Republican party. Like Lincoln before him, Garfield combined aggressive campaigning for other Republicans with his own campaigns, and would serve as both a Representative and a state Senator.
One of the more contentious issues he was embroiled with was the ‘spoils system’, in which civil service jobs were handed out to political insiders rather than on merit. The “Stalwarts” of his party defended the practice: it was simply how the game was worked. You put in the work, you reap the rewards. Many in both parties, however, wanted civil service reform, and Garfield was among that number — if not a zealot for the cause the way his Democratic counterpart Cleveland was. The debate within the GOP was such that when Garfield was chosen to be the Republican candidate, he was saddled with a bitter rival within the party, Chester Arthur, who defended the spoils system. Garfield and Arthur got along so poorly that they’d refuse to speak to the other, and there were times when Arthur was refused access to the White House entirely! this made Arthur’s life after Garfield was shot most unenviable: he was positioned to ascend to the White House because a would-be assassin shot Garfield and cried “I am a Stalwart! Arthur is president now!”. Talk about bad optics.
Garfield is a unique entry in the American Presidents series because it was written by a surgeon who takes special interest in the details of Garfield’s fate after he was shot. While we now know that the bullet hit no vital organs, doctors at the time did not, and had no real way of knowing — Alexander Graham Bell’s prototype metal detector notwithstanding. They kept probing his wound with unwashed fingers and unwashed tools, ultimately leading to massive internal infections and months of prolonged pain and malnourishment: the man vomited constantly, losing a dramatic amount of weight. Rutkow devoted at least a quarter of the book to the subject of medicine at the time, and how badly Garfield was treated by men who should have known better, even as limited as their tools were. (Tellingly, Rutkow refers to the assassination attempt: Garfield was effectively killed by malpractice.)
This was a most interesting read, though it doesn’t give a huge idea into the man himself beyond a sense that he was devoted to his family, his party, and his friends; he was intellectually gifted, and appears to have been setting a good course for his office before he was shot, despite some earlier indiscretions while in office dealing with lobbyists and conflicts of interest.
Today’s TTT is ‘bookish places’, which will be a hard one, but let’s see what I manage. But first, the Tuesday Tease!
“A little polis living orderly in a high place is stronger than block-headed Nineveh,” the Assyrian capital destroyed in 612. A city-state of middling citizens governing themselves through common, publicly available laws and institutions would outlive the larger, mightier cities controlled by kings and nobles who ruled through private whim and self-interest and who lorded it over impoverished, disgruntled masses.” – GREEK WAYS, Bruce Thornton
(1) The Very Large Array. I visited this science station on the plains of San Agustin in New Mexico because of Contact, both the movie and the book.
(2) To be honest, all of New Mexico: I visited it because of Ed Abbey’s writings about the Southwest and Tony Hillerman’s The Great Taos Bank Robbery. The land of enchantment lives up to its name. I’ve been longing to go back for ten years now (!) but between medical crises and COVID it just hasn’t happened.
(3) Broad Street Books and its successor, Fairoaks Books.
Various events at Broad Street Books
A friend of mine opened Broad Street Books back in 2020 or 2021 because he felt a town Selma’s size needed a proper bookstore; a half-aisle in Walmart selling the latest airport fiction didn’t count. BSB quickly became a gathering place in town, both on purpose and on accident; David would host events like discussions with authors (his nephew is Lars Brownworth, who you can imagine I got a kick out of meeting), but the bookish community in Selma would also gather accidentally. Back when the library was still closed on Saturdays in the COVID and immediate post-covid era (it took us a while to reopen – like 2022, I think), I’d go by there every Saturday morning and got used to spending a few hours sitting and talking with either David or other people who came by. David had hoped that its position on our downtown thoroughfare would lead to lots of foot traffic, but most tourists were happy to walk right on by.
Paying a visit on National Independent Bookstores Day
A year or so back he made the decision to switch venues, buying a small cottage in the Fairoaks district: it allowed for more room for both books and conversation, and since then he’s hosted events there as well – including a series in which mayoral candidates talked about books that had inspired them. It’s harder to casually drop by Fairoaks, though, and parking is more challenging because it’s surrounded by narrow residential streets.
School Board Superintendent Johnny Moss III, now Mayor Moss
(4) The late, great, Eclipse Books
The Eclipse was the place in Montevallo to go when I was a student there, at least for my crowd. (I think the jocks had a sports bar some place.) It was a bookstore, bar, and cafe with a huge wraparound porch. I had no spending money whatsoever, but when someone asked you to hang out at the Eclipse, you went there. Unfortunately, the philosophy professor/astronomy club guru who owned it got tired of running the place, and it closed down These days the building is a tasty Mexican place with a more varied menu than I usually see, but as far as I know the Eclipse’s status as a bookish spot has never been filled by anyone else. There was a small coffee shop that tried for a while — and it had chess sets, board games, etc — but I think it folded.
(5) Monroeville.
Monroeville bills itself as Alabama’s literary capital because it was home to both Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Once while going to visit the historic courthouse (now a museum), I happened to arrive on the same night the Players were staging a production of the play based on To Kill a Mockingbird!
(6) Parnell Memorial Public Library
Would you look at that library? Isn’t it cute? And it has a park with a storywalk, and then there’s a baseball field. You can sit there, as I did this very April, reading a book and listening to kids play ball. It is a key member of a ridiculously picturesque scene. If I created it in a story, people would go, “Oh, how mawkish and absurd, places like that don’t exist!”. But it does, dear reader, it does. When I was a student at the University of Montevallo, I had the weekly pleasure of strolling just a few blocks here and picking up a stack of books, and then I could sit and read outside, if I wanted to. My girlfriend and I have met at this park more than a few times. The library has a larger building attached to it that also hosts a community theater group known as the Montevallo Main Street Players. It’s so gosh-darn wholesome.
(7) COAS Books – Las Cruces, New Mexico
COAS Books comes to mind because it was literally the first independent bookstore I ever went inside of thinking of it as a bookstore; the Eclipse was more like bar/cafe that also sold books. As I remember, I found an Asimov title in here. COAS was one of the few high points of visiting Las Cruces, and I don’t say that to diminish LC: it just happened that it was raining and gloomy the two days I was there, and Google maps was very misleading about the hotel I’d picked out. Instead of staying in a cool place surrounded by restaurants, I stayed in a definitely-gone-to-seed place surrounded by recently closed restaurants. My first meal in Cruces was a truck stop Taco Bell, because I’d been driving all day and needed something, and every place was closed, and — one of these days I’ll go back to Las Cruces. (Looking back on my post of it, I have to smile at the fickleness of memory: all I remember now is driving into town in the rain, getting frustrated about not being able to find any place to eat, and feeling down because the neighborhood, but judging by my post at the time I came away enjoying the experience in general.)
(8) Roswell, NM.
You can see why I bought a proper camera phone (Galaxy S7) before I returned out west. The Grand Canyon merited more than these muddy shots!
Why is this turning into a New Mexico post? The Land of Enchantment strikes again! I have to mention Roswell specifically because it was a place I became interested in via Roswell High and then the first WB Roswell show. When I first began planning a New Mexico trip, Roswell was a must: not because I believe there was an alien encounter there, but because in middle school I had alien posters and my best friend Gil and I were obsessed with Roswell High. I wasn’t in Roswell very long, and I was too tired from spending most of the day at the Living Desert zoo to go looking for Roswell High School (I’d planned to send Gil a picture of it), but what I saw that Sunday afternoon was absolutely charming.
(9) St. Augustine
When I came back from New Mexico, I was newly fascinated by the Spanish colonial heritage in America, so within a year of visiting the west, I started exploring the Spanish gulf coast — first in books, then in person. My coworker and I made the mistake of going on Memorial Day weekend, so it was packed, but good lord was that a beautiful city, and I hadn’t seen the Gulf in ages. St. Augustine particularly intrigued me because it’s the oldest European settlement in America — bar the claims of Pensacola, which maintains it is the oldest city in America, and it doesn’t count that the town was abandoned for a while and St. Augustine was founded in the interim. (I’m a big fan of P-Cola, and it’s a lot easier to get to than St. Augustine.)
(10) The Selma-Dallas County Library
Borrowed from the internets. Our building is an entire block long and half a block wide, so it’s hard to capture in one shot
Can’t very well write about bookish spaces without mentioning the library I grew up in, the library I grew up with — it added a second wing in the mid-1990s — and the library I’ve worked in for close to fifteen years now. Reading Freely began as “This Week at the Library”: that library has been the Selma library, because at first I was literally blogging about my weekly trips here. A slight plurality of the books I’ve read on this blog over the years have come from this library, and before I worked here I loved sitting in its courtyard, reading, or holing up in local history; now if I try that it’s “Hey, Stephen, could you help with ________”. I still do a HUGE amount of my reading here, but it’s mostly in the lunchroom. In addition to our own programming (books, cooking, arts and crafts, etc), we’re also ground zero for community events: our meeting spaces are almost always in use. Some photos:
You come here so often. Aren’t you afraid of radiation?” “No. It’s only here that life won’t slip by me, for I’m living it in the most exotic place on Earth.”
“This is Chernobyl, too”, someone posted on reddit, captioning a large radar-like installation. “Huh,” says I. A radar station? In the Zone? I’d never heard of such a thing. When I looked at its satellite footage, I noticed something nearby — Pripyat? No, not big enough. What was it? That was Chernobyl-2. Stealth-pun redditors for the win, I suppose.
The discussion thread which followed mentioned Stalking the Atomic City as a source for someone who’d spent time in Chernobyl-2, which was a military town servicing the radar station. It’s a hard day’s hike from what most people think of as Chernobyl, twenty miles or so. A “stalker” is a common name for people who enter and spend time in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone illicitly; they have no permission, and unlike official tourists, they’re not registered. What brings them there? To judge by Marikyan Kamysh’s account, they go there because it’s there — for the thrill of being where the law and good sense forbid them, or or being alone. There is something there that calls to their souls; Kamysh has made the trip over a thousand times, by his account.
The broader exclusion zone, off the tourist-beaten track, is a place of emptiness and nature’s severity; in one instant Kamysh wakes up to find that he spent the night in the same room as a wolf corpse that had been rotting slowly in the cold for ages. Kamysh’s excursions, which include time spent in radioactive areas he’s not aware or caring of — he carries no dosimeters — frequently seem pointless to me, as he literally breaks in several times a month to do rough sleeping in the woods or the military town of Chernobyl-2. (He avoids “wretched Prypyat”: it’s so touristy these days.) There’s a salient camaraderie between stalkers, though; while some come to be alone, they also enjoy camping out with one another and sharing snacks and vodka, the latter being explained as a drink that won’t freeze overnight. There’s an amusing hypocrisy here as he comments on the Zone slowly fading away as people continue to come and devour the abandoned buildings for salvage, even as he throws old chairs into his campfire during his multi-day stays in the Zone. (He also throws books in the fire after he’s looked them over which sets my teeth on edge even if they are math texts and communist politics.)
This was an interesting little book — a raw look into a place few go, and the writing has a strange attraction to it even when it’s vulgar. There were surprises here, too; Kamysh spends nights in an abandoned Orthodox church, when I assumed the Soviets were aggressively anti-Christian, and he has his most dangerous wildlife encounter not in the wilds but in a village where a lynx mother had turned a vacant house into her den.
Quotations
The Dead City. Dead, oh yes. Twice dead. For the second time, with the emergence of thousands of photos and the shitty lines of official tours. Bored hipsters shot Prypyat dead with their expensive cameras; rich girls from the capital soiled the rotten couches with their tattooed backs and mapped every nook of the terra incognita on Instagram. The sense of mystery has been lost; it has escaped, vanished in the web. The aura of mysticism was scattered like ash in all directions, flying through the Internet byways to distant foreign lands. After that, abandoned apartments can’t be scary.
Day three here, and it seems that the murk has deliberately spread its sullen skirts and pressed down on you with its cold clouds and drizzle. It wraps cotton balls of a morning fog around your throat and goads you with the whips of thirst through the bushes toward downtown. It goads you through the dew and wasteland toward the well-trodden stairs of the pier. I’ll fill up my plastic bottles there and guzzle this metal-flavored liquid without worrying about the harm it can do. It’s pouring outside. I fidget on the couch, listening to music through one ear pod, pull out my sleeping bag, and crawl as deep inside it as possible. The battery dies faster than the sun sets, hidden by the clouds and wrapped in a hundred layers of fall mist. I’m sitting like this with the balcony doors open, listening to raindrops pattering, wild boars padding around, listening to the rain, silence, distant metal banging, and the screams of illegal tourists.
The calm and peace that my soul needs are here; I hate thinking about going back. I’d better go look for some old books in the classrooms of the local schools. Otherwise, I’ll fly off the handle and stay here to write insane monologues and magic spells in forgotten languages with charcoal on the walls.
“I don’t understand you, Captain. I am offering you a chance to survive.” “There are more important things than survival,” Picard said very softly. “And no, you do not understand us. May we never so change that you do. Out.”
The memory of thirty years ago is hazy, but I can look back through it and see one moment of clarity: my best friend Gil and I walking around during lunch period (we always skipped lunch in favor of roaming the campus), while I told him about this Star Trek book I’d found. we were the founding members of a very short lived Star Trek fan club, our respective codenames being Sisko and Data (he was Data), and he was REALLY into the premise of this. What could get two seventh graders so worked up?
The classic ST TOS episode “Mirror, Mirror” saw members of Captain Kirk’s crew accidentally swap places with their counterparts in the so-called Mirror Universe, a place where the Federation was rather different than the humanist paradise we know and love. Its officers were arrogant, mean, and avaricious; promotions were effected Klingon-style, and the women showed off their middriffs as well as their legs. Dark Mirror revisited the Mirror Universe long before Deep Space Nine did, and presented a darker and far more serious version of it. DS9 and ENT’s version of the Mirror Universe seemed loosely predicated on alternate history with random funhouse elements; the opening credits of the ENT episode in particular appeared to imply that the Terran Empire rose because the Nazis won World War 2. Dark Mirror, however, sees a mirror universe where reality and character are fundamentally altered: foul is fair. Human nature is mirrored, flipped; the noblest of characters in our universe is the most sinister and depraved: Picard is so shaken by his review of their literature (Achilles executes Priam in their Illiad) that he refuses to continue their version of Shakespeare or even open their Bible. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Enterprise is operating at the far reaches of space, there to facilitate a Cetacean scientist researching ‘hyperstrings’; they receive a message from another ship in the sector that is incomprehensible but strongly suggests bad things are in the offing, and then — a sudden dimming of reality, and a deep sense of unease among the crew. Nothing appears to have changed, but the Enterprise is no longer in its own universe. It has been sucked into the Mirror Universe by the triumphant Terran Empire, which has run out of worlds to conquer and is interested in seeing how it can project power into the ‘other’ universe — hours — and take it, as well. (Mind you, it hasn’t conquered the entire Milky Way, just the local ‘arm’ we’re in: given the scales involved, though, it’s evidently easier to invade another universe than travel to another arm of the galaxy.) This leads to some “Mirror, Mirror” style stealth and deceit, and is something of a psychological thriller as Picard and others realize how disturbing their counterparts are and work to foil their plans without being exposed and then tortured. There’s a strong undercurrent of sexual malice here, something the DS9 mirror universe stories played with in the person of The Intendant.
This was just as good as I remember, even more so because I’ve actually seen “Mirror, Mirror” and particularly enjoyed Duane’s writing — especially the time we spent in Picard’s head. Because I wasn’t able to watch a lot of TOS as a kid, this was my introduction to the Mirror Universe, and I found the premise completely thrilling. Duane’s worldbuilding, developing these Terrans’ history and culture, made the story even more effective. Duane actually tries to recreate what their alter-Shakespeare might have read like, but I was so unfamiliar with the plays discussed (“The Merchant of Venice” was one I recognized purely for the Shylock character) that I didn’t fully get the darkness there. Although this Mirror Universe is definitely un-canon, it’s more psychologically if not historically interesting than the one DS9 developed, and I say that as someone who loves DS9.
Quotations
“Captain,” Hwiii said in what sounded like complete satisfaction, “I am going to be as happy as a clam in mud.” “How does one go about quantifying the emotional state of mollusks, Commander?” Data asked innocently as Picard headed back for the turbolift.
“What kind of people are we there?” she said. Picard looked briefly off into the distance. “Another Enterprise…, he said softly. “Another Troi…” “Another Picard,” Deanna said. “Cold, he saw you. A grim, quiet terror, hard, like iron. And another Riker—cruel, and liking the cruelty.” She breathed out, feeling Stewart’s fear still clawing at her back. “And you?” Picard said. “Death,” Deanna said, “in an odd uniform. And worse than either of you.”
I cannot tell you how many times I read through this book in high school, but it’s the foundation of everything I know about Star Trek’s original production, from the practical effects to the behind the scenes drama. I Am Spock is not entirely about Star Trek – it’s more of a memoir of Nimoy’s life current to 1995 – but Trek, or “Spock”, completely dominates it. As part of this week’s retro-reading, I wanted to revisit it for the first time in many years.
Part of understanding I Am Spock is that Nimoy had written a previous memoir called I Am Not Spock, which covered his early career and gave fans the impression that Nimoy was trying to distance himself from his pointy-eared hobgoblin alter ego. This led to speculation later on, after the details of The Wrath of Khan were revealed, that Nimoy had consented to do the movie only on the promise that Spock be killed off so that Nimoy could move on in his career. That’s not just fan speculation, either: producers thought Nimoy was distancing himself from Spock as early as The Motion Picture, when their original script barely included the character at all. That is not the case, Nimoy argues here: a thesis of the memoir is that while Nimoy views himself as more than Spock, he nonetheless accepts that Spock has become a deeply ingrained part of his being. Living in a character’s skin for so long – fighting for that character’s integrity, in fact, doing more of the character’s development than the writers did – had permanently altered Nimoy’s own being.
Nimoy realized he wanted to be an actor fairly early in life, being a shy and awkward boy who found relief from social awkwardness in disappearing behind a role and making it his own. He began as a disfigured young boxer in Kid Monk Baroni, then began appearing on The Lieutenant and making a useful contact: Gene Roddenberry. Roddenberry was then working on a pilot for a new show, and wondered if Nimoy might be interested. I never fail to delight in learning about the production aspects of shows like Star Trek that I love, and I Am Spock is full of interesting ones – from Roddenberry thinking that Spock should sound as if he learned English from cassette tapes (hence the slightly English intonation Spock sometimes had early on) to screen tests with “alien” skins (a red Spock looked horrible on black and white sets) and Nimoy’s increasing arguments with writers as he began grokking the character. (Fun fact: Spock quickly became so loved that bumper stickers saying “I GROK SPOCK” became a thing.)
The memoir covers the entirety of TOS’s original run, including Nimoy’s bewilderment that the show, and his character, could become so popular; at first he hadn’t even removed his number from the public telephone listings. Nimoy did not fall to pieces when the original five-year-mission ended two seasons too early; instead, he moved on to other work. Acting was a job, after all, not a religion, and he was eager to try more challenging roles and even begin working as a director. But love for Star Trek ballooned in the 1970s as the show hit syndication, and the arrival of Star Wars created pressure for a Trek revival – a movie of its own, and maybe another show. Star Trek: Phase II was interesting to learn about as a kid, especially after seeing how details of it were incorporated into The Motion Picture and later Trek works. Nimoy truly thought Trek had shot its bolt after The Motion Picture– who could want more of that highbrow bloat, the promiscuous tracking shots? Where was the movement, the fun? Still, though, the explosion of fan conventions and the persistent interest in more Trek gradually made Nimoy aware that Spock was going to be inescapable for him. Star Trek was penetrating the culture, with magazine ads saying stuff like ‘to boldly go’, and billboard ads boasting his image – and his ears! – in a very suggestive Heineken ad. Star Trek was far from done, though: while Nimoy continued working on other projects – film, theater, photography, poetry – Paramount Pictures had made Star Trek its own and wanted to bring Trek back to the big screen. That would lead to Nimoy getting his chance at high-level direction when The Search for Spock became his baby to develop and direct.
Although I’ve read this book so many times over the years that parts of it have been committed to memory, I really enjoyed settling in again. The story is one I enjoy revisiting, in part because Nimoy was such a serious performer and then director – but his ongoing dialogue with Spock adds enormously to the memoir. It’s punctuated with literal discussions between Nimoy and his alter-ego on what he and Star Trek are going through, and these conversations can range from simply funny to downright poignant. Nimoy’s interactions with other people, too, are rewarding to read about – from his impassioned debates with writers over how Spock would react to this or that, to his brotherly rivalry with Bill Shatner which would result in constant pranking and fooling around on set. This would continue even when Nimoy was directing Shatner, as they’d get into mock-arguments on set, pounding desks and shouting while the camera crew rolled their eyes and waited for the tomfoolery to desist. Nimoy and Isaac Asimov’s exchanges by letter are also amusing; I hadn’t met the dear doctor when I first read this, but now having consumed scores of Asimov titles, it was fun to see him discussing Spock’s attraction to women with Nimoy. All the while, Nimoy’s genuine love for Spock as a character, as an ideal and as a person come through.
One thing this memoir made me think about: Star Trek has survived at least two deaths to date, its execution in early 1969 and its collapse from overmilking in the mid-2000s. Despite Trek’s status in summer 2026 – with no shows in production, only rumors of a movie, and a fanbase divided and exhausted – I don’t think it’s dead yet.
Highly recommended.
Spock: Live long and prosper. Nimoy: I think I’ve already done the former, Spock. And — in no small part thanks to you — I’ve certainly done the latter.
Related: I Am Spock, Leonard Nimoy. I didn’t realize, but I re-read and reviewed this on the blog back in 2010. It’s interesting to see how 2010 me and 2026 me notice similar things but have different priorities. (2010 me has a lot less personality as a writer, too, I think.)
Captain Jean-Luc Picard just showed up at a sector captains’ meeting with a serious case of imposter syndrome. He’s all of 28, and the only reason he’s a captain is that everyone higher else up on the command chain got killed and he made good acting-captain decisions when he was suddenly thrust into the chair. No one takes him seriously at the meeting, except for Admiral McActeer, who has inexplicably and publicly declared that Captain Picard is now tasked with taking down the White Wolf, some pirate who’s been plaguing the sector. It’s nice to have higher command believing in him, he supposes, but this feels a bit much for a first jo – wait. Admiral McActeer just assigned him seven new crewmembers without Picard’s input, and they’re all Breakfast Club level problematic? Welcome to Gauntlet, the first in the Star Trek: Stargazer series!
Michael Jan Friedman is one of the earliest Treklit authors I got attached to, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this series wasn’t responsible for that. In another book, Valiant, MJF depicted the circumstances that saw a young Picard take emergency command of the good ship Valiant, leading to his promotion to Captain and his receiving the Stargazer. Gauntlet begins very soon after Picard receives his first command, and the outlook is not good. His first mission is seemingly impossible: to take down a pirate who three outstanding captains have failed to capture, in large part because the White Wolf holes up in a Badlands-type system where space is not vast and mostly empty, but a minefield of energy distortions that cripple sensors and can destroy ships. However – The White Wolf lives there. There must be a way to navigate. But can a young captain and an untested crew – worse, a crew partially hobbled by new problem children the Admiral wants to get rid of – find the way?
There’s a lot going on in this little novel, as we see Picard struggling against his own self doubt but relying on a mostly-memorable ensemble cast to improvise solutions through the not-Badlands’ wild array of hostile space phenomena. This is truly an ensemble story, because while Picard does take the center stage, he does not dominate the novel; instead we follow a security officer with disciplinary problems but a heart of gold, another officer who is perfect paragon of Starfleet virtue who…is also a bully toward crewmen who look like dressed turkeys, and a second officer who is so punctilious I can’t help but cast her with Kim Cattrall’s Valeris. There’s an interesting mix of “bad officers who are good, good officers who are bad, and bad officers who, yep, were really bad” present here, and not everyone is dealt with in this first novel as I remember. This series had one of those scenes that I SWORE I REMEMBER BEING IN THE SHOW but apparently only happened in my head: Picard orders a retreat, and then a sudden stop that coincides with a full broadside of phaser and torpedo fire. When his crew asks, politely, ‘The hell was that, sir?” he says he got the idea from a fencing maneuver called a stop-thrust, which often begins with a feigned retreat.
Good stuff all around. I suspect I’ll be reading Progenitor, too, because it’s got a bit of poetry or song in it that I’ve remembered for 25+ years and have always been frustrated by because I’ve hoped to find the full thing and am hoping it’s not something MJF just made up one single verse for.
Related: Stargazer: Three, Michael Jan Friedman. Somehow I skipped this novel when I was reading the original run of the series, and in 2010 when I began trying to catch up on the Treklit universe buying used paperbacks, this is one I went after.
Centuries ago, in the days of legends like Captain Pike and Captain Murat, the Federation fought an undeclared war against an aggressive reptilian warrior-race called the Tarn. The war ended in an armistice that established a small no-fly zone between the Tarn and Federation’s respective spheres of influence, but now an atomic bomb has been detected within the zone. The zone no one is supposed to be in. Investigating, Captain Picard is astonished to discover that the survivors of two ships – one Starfleet, one Tarn – that both crash-landed on a desolate planet have been carrying on their own war for centuries. The timing couldn’t be worse, as the Federation and Tarn were preparing to revisit the armistice and establish a more lasting peace on top of it. Nevertheless, Picard must try to put an end to the hostilities between the two factions, whose progress up the tech-tree of history has arrived at World War 2, complete with P-51 Mustangs and M1 Garands. When he loses contact with the landing party – including a Tarn representative who goes native – things deteriorate.
Kid-me loved this novel, because he was obsessed with all things World War 2 – but especially P-51 Mustangs, about which he wrote a paper. (Strictly speaking he partially plagiarized a paper, quoting at length from Albert Marrin’s The Airman’s War but forgetting the niceties like proper citation marks.) Adult me is far more dubious about the ability of humans living in underground tunnels and caverns to have the manufacturing base necessary to create P-51s and rifled carbines, let alone that of psychopathic lizard-people to create the equivalent of the Manhattan Project from nothing but ‘stone knives and bear skins’, as Spock might’ve put it. The humans, for their own part, are disturbing to the Enterprise crew: while they still identify with something called The Federation, reproducing its uniforms from their ship’s databases, they are a society that has been shaped by desperate warfare for centuries. Their civilization is a mix of mythic memory and feral warfare, and they have no desire to make nice with the Tarn despite the lizards having a-bombs that amplify their many logistical advantages over the humans. Still worse, the landing party inadvertently gave away the location of the main human base, and the on-planet Tarn are going to capitalize on that to crush their long-chased prey. And then there’s the Tarn representative, who is so excited about the prospect of fighting war The Old Way (in Stukas, as God intended) that he forgets he’s meant to be telling these people that their war ended a long time ago.
This was a fun novel to revisit, completely absorbing. The premise is a bit silly, yes, but I enjoyed the world-building Forstchen did in regards to the Tarn: while they could be written off as crazier-than-usual Klingons-who-happen-to-be-lizard-people, their clan-oriented society is interesting in itself and creates lots of opportunities for political drama. The big hitch in that is the Tarn envoy, whose entire reason for being is to hate the Federation. Do they make a speical room for him so he’s comfortable? Pathetic weaklings. Did they win a battle against his ancestors? Treacherous cowards! Are they trying to establish peace on the planet? Losers! – or wait, unless Picard is stalling for time to bring in reinforcements, in which case Starfleet is treacherous again. There’s no winning with him, no depth to him, and no interest in him. On the bright side, the author leads heavily into TNG’s highbrow nature, with lots of poetry being quoted, and the story ends in a full spread of Federation goodness.
On a WILD sidebar note: I read this author (William R. Forstchen) in the 2010s and didn’t clock his name at all until I pasted in the cover for this review. You wouldn’t expect a guy writing doomer fiction (post-EMP survival) to also do Star Trek, though admittedly the premise of this does overlap a bit with survivalism.
Leonard Nimoy, musing on the Spock/McCoy dynamic in I Am Spock:
I’m a doctor, not a third-base coach!
McCoy, frustrated: Now wait a minute, Spock! When the first baseman gets his paycheck, who gets the money? Spock: It is only logical that he should do so, since he provided his services. McCoy: Who did? Spock: Precisely, Doctor. “Who” did. “Who” receives the money. McCoy: Are you trying to confuse me, you green-blooded son of a —! Spock: Control yourself, Doctor.
Reading Freely 
