Fallen Heroes

Posted on October 25, 2010 by smellincoffee

DS9 #5: Fallen Heroes
© 1994 Dafydd ab Hugh
282 pages

On the cover: renderings of Avery Brooks as Commander Benjamin Sisko and Nana Visitor as Major Kira Nerys — although that expression makes her look more like Michelle Forbes as Ro Laren.

The day everyone on Deep Space Nine died started like any other: Sisko sat in his office brooding over intelligence reports, O’Brian and Kira were overworked, Dax sat happily at the science station watching the wormhole open, and Odo harassed  Quark over his latest scheme — this time, to auction off a locked box of goods from the Gamma Quadrant. Hoping to catch Quark selling cultural artifacts, he forced Quark to open the book so that the contents could be examined. One particular object defied description, but once activated threw the pair three days into the future — where DS9’s once-bustling promenade  has fallen deathly silent, its hallways and corridors strewn with littered corpses and evidence of explosions. Something terrible happened in those three days.

When I picked this up, I thought the description of a ‘silent DS9’ meant that everyone had vanished from the station. I wasn’t expecting to witness the brutal death of everyone onboard — including civilians and children — at the hands of a heavily-armed squad of alien commandos claiming to seek a captured comrade.  ab Hugh divides chapters between Odo and Quark’s perspective and the perspective of the DS9 crew in the ‘present’, who are powerless to find out what the commandos want or to resist them.  The security mooks are first to go, but no one who engages the aliens lives — and given their meticulous search, no one who hides will long escape a merciless execution. It’s up to Odo and Quark to figure out how to get back and prevent this assault before it begins.

This is book five of the numbered Deep Space Nine stories: though set early in the first season, ab Hugh manages to avoid any conflicts with future continuity. Only Odo’s dialogues came off as odd, though Kira’s tendency to compare the invaders to Borg drones is also peculiar, given that she’s never had contact with them. I picked this up because I’ve read ab Hugh before (my first Star Trek read was his Vengeance, which I remember with fondness), and he doesn’t disappoint. Though morbid, most of the book reads like an action thriller.

I didn’t pick this up for ‘scary readings’, but reading about 500+ murders in 16 hours, including those of my favorite characters, made this seasonally appropriate.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The War of the Worlds

Posted on October 23, 2010 by smellincoffee

The War of the Worlds
© 1898 H.G. Wells
from The War of the Worlds with The Time Machine and Selected Short Stories, collected 1963.
303 pages

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.

It is the late eighteen-hundreds, the high-water mark of western civilization. Western man and his science are ascendant, triumphant:  while the old empires of the east wither and decay, the virile west takes dominion of the world, uniting it with iron rails and ships belching steam. The earth surrenders her bounty to the miners, and in the cities — in which people gather in ever-increasing numbers — towers of steel climb into the skies, rivaling the trees from which we sprang so long ago.  But far away, lurking in the cold of space, lies another civilization, one which sees in the flourishing Earth new life for its own people — and salvation from its dying world. Like the the Trojans of legend, they have come to our own Italy seeking to establish a new home for themselves — and they care little for its current occupants.

The narrator of this work, an unnamed intellectual who is trained in comparative biology but is well-versed in all manner of sciences and technology, was there the night the first cylinder arrived. It crashed not two miles from his home, and he regarded these unannounced visitors with wonder, curiosity, and even sympathy at first — hoping as the cylinder cooled and began to open that the brave men inside had survived their journey all right. Never does it occur to our guide that these visitors come to Earth as the Puritans came to the Americans — for gold, god, and glory.  Even when the heat-ray vaporizes the fascinated crowds,  the survivors cling to the hope that there’s been a misunderstanding.  Every night that passes brings with it a new cylinder, and from the landing sites rise terrifying machines that visit death on anyone and anything that they approach. The crowds were first scattered by the heat-ray, but when the Martians’ advance is countered by artillery and iron-clads the otherworldly machines begin belching black smoke of their own — visiting the area around them with clouds of noxious gas that mitigate any thoughts of resistance.

They march toward London, and civilization flees from them, leaving behind towns in flames and thousands dead. A great mass of humanity routs southward, but our own guide through this harrowing time is trapped  in a partially-destroyed home. The man who had enjoyed a quiet evening chatting with his wife over wine, followed by a session at the typewriter discussing civilization’s moral progress is reduced to hiding in rubble, scurrying from ditch to bush and eating anything he can find while surrounded by the ruins of his old world and wondering what is yet to come. Will men take to the sewers, begin life anew while the Martians?  But this is not to be — for humanity’s greatest weapon is its heritage, having overcome generations of diseases that the Martians are utterly unprepared for.

War of the Worlds is a fascinating book; when doing research for my various WW1 papers I learned of the genre of  “invasion literature”*, which became popular in the late 1800s following Prussia’s swift technological victory over the French Empire in 1871. Fantasizing about how technological advances like balloons and airplanes could render a nation helpless in a matter of days was quite popular for a time, and though I am not familiar with the history of science fiction,  I wouldn’t be surprised if Worlds grew out of that and the increasing interest in Mars and other close astronomical bodies.  The devastation visited on civilian populations and the use of poison gas predicts some of the ravages of the Great War.

Wells is an effective writer, taking the reader through our guide’s wonder,  fear, terror, and joy. The guide is ideal for me: I like idealistic intellectuals like our unnamed host, who takes pleasure in the pursuit of knowledge. His status as an intellectual allows him to analyze the aliens’ biology, their machines, and what their world may be like — and his well-rounded education makes the epilogue’s musing predictions fascinating.    War of the Worlds is very much a classic, enjoyable though dated: the vastness of space probably insulates us against alien invasions, and I snorted when Wells mentioned that the Martians had effected a landing on Venus. Knowledge gained throughout the 20th century indicates that Venus is as inhospitable as it gets.

Good reading for those interested in a harrowing adventure, or a peek into classic science fiction.  If you enjoy Wells or want to own some of his works, this particular edition seems like a good investment. It gathers two classics along with a few short stories I’ve not yet read but intend to.  The publishers are Platt & Munk, a division of Grosset and Dunlap.  ISBN: 0-448-41106-7. The cover has a retro feel, and the introduction refers to Wells’ work as “scientific romance”, which I find endearingly quaint.

* Walter J. Boyne’s The Influence of Air Power Upon History shows that invasion literature was not just the stuff of fiction, but a concern to military strategists.

Posted in Reviews, science fiction | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

True Grit

Posted on October 21, 2010 by smellincoffee

True Grit
© 1968 Charles Portis
215 pages

People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band. Here is what happened.

So begins True Grit, a novel based on a movie I enjoyed many times in my youth, starring John Wayne as the one-eyed US Marshall, Rooster Cogburn, who Mattie  — the opening speaker — hires to help her track down Chaney and the crew of rascals and vagabonds he’s gone to ground with. Mattie is a wily, self-assured girl from Arkansas who knows what she’s doing and aims to get what she wants. Cogburn thinks a girl such as she has no business riding around in Indian territory looking for crooks, but is powerless to prevent her from following him — and together, accompanied by a Texas Ranger hunting Chaney for bounty, the two will brave the mountains and take down the gang of Lucky Ned Pepper.

True Grit’s most striking characteristic is its prose: simple, rough and oddly formal. I have heard Isaac Asimov’s style described as ‘unornamented’, but Asimov has nothing on Porter, at least in rendering Mattie’s tale. Mattie recalls the story in her silver years, and her narrative is in line with her character: bluntly plain, loaded with Puritan sentiments and judgments that sometimes border on inappropriate. She uses no contractions or descriptions: dialogue is flat,  which given the content of the sentences makes for surreal humor.  Characters argue in monotone, exchanging lines like “You take that saucy line too far,” and even in a context when they should be yelling or crying, they merely state: “Well, Rooster, I am shot to pieces.”  Because I’ve watched the movie — which the book is largely true to, only differing in the epilogue — I could hear the lines with emotional context, but I don’t know what others will make of it.



True Grit is essentially a western,  which is a genre I’ve not read from since childhood. The flat prose struck me as odd, though I suppose it adds to the authenticity in depicting the rugged simplicity of the old west. It’s readable, but…I rather prefer the movie. I don’t too much like Hattie in either — though her stubbornness is laudable, I tire of that constant haughtiness — but the movie has a cantankerous, and sometimes drunken, John Wayne.

Related:
True Grit (the movie) on TvTropes

Posted in historical fiction, Reviews | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

The Good that Men Do

Posted on October 21, 2010 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Enterprise: the Good that Men Do
© 2007 Michael Martin and Andy Mangels
464 pages

There’s a man who leads a life of danger
 To everyone he meets he stays a stranger
 With every move he makes another chance he takes
 Odds are he won’t live to see tomorrow!
 Secret Agent Man! Secret Agent Man!
 They’ve given you a number and taken away your name….



No series finale and few episodes of any of the various Star Trek shows are treated with as much loathing as “These are the Voyages“, the series finale of Enterprise. The reasons are numerous, but the useless death of a major character and the episode’s framing device are particularly despised. The episode is treated as a holographic recreation of one of Enterprise’s missions — the mission that caused the aforementioned useless death, and Commander William Riker is viewing the historical events as a way of drumming up courage to confess something to Captain Picard.  The device effectively turns the last Enterprise episode into various scenes tucked into TNG’s “The Pegasus”, but its portrayal as a holographic recording allowed Martin and Mangels to reinterpret the story with  framing device of their own.

Late in the 25th century, Captain Nog of Starfleet makes his way to see his best friend, the famous author Jake Sisko. While reviewing recently declassified files from Starfleet’s early history, he’s stumbled upon something that would make a compelling novel in the hands of a gifted author — historical records that indicate that the accepted history of the Federation’s beginnings is fabricated. A Starfleet commander was declared dead, even though new records indicate that he played a far more active role in historical events yet to come than would be expected of a dead man, and new records make the official story look painfully fabricated. And so the two old friends spend an evening viewing the records together, finding out what really happened in the days before the birth of the Coalition of Planets, the Federation’s progenitor.  The novel is in essence a ret-con of “These are the Voyages”, one sanctioned by Paramount and CBS, that turns one of the series’ most badly received episodes into a fantastic novel of politics, espionage, and war. For the sake of the Federation’s survival, one man will fake his own death so he may steal into the shadows and infiltrate enemy territory to prevent a war from endangering the lives of billions.

The Good that Men Do redeems “These are the Voyages” while giving attention to my favorite character from Enterprise, Commander ‘Trip’ Tucker. In addition to undoing some of the episode’s ‘mistakes’, Martin and Mangels also iron out all the various oddities of the episode, but The Good that Men Do can stand on its own. It is the introduction to the Enterprise relaunch, and in recounting Tucker’s story makes  the Relaunch’s first major arc obvious: the mysterious Romulan Star Empire is ambitious and paranoid, and sees in Earth’s attempts to unite the worlds of Vulcan, Andor, Tellar, and Coridan a major threat against its future plans of expansion. War seems unavoidable, but Tucker — aided by a mysterious and autonomous intelligence department within Starfleet — intends to make Romulus’ job as difficult as possible.  Martin and Mangels tackle the Tucker/T’Tpol dynamic well, though I’m surprised Archer agreed to Tucker’s plans so readily. In any case, I want to read more of these guys and look forward to Star Trek’s new “007”‘s adventures.

Related:

  • “Journey to Babel“,  in which the Enterprise carries delegates from Vulcan, Andor, and Earth to discuss Coridan’s entry into the Federation. I wonder how much work their make-up artists went through…(The episode introduced Sarek, Spock’s father.)
  • Cloak, S.D. Perry; Rogue, Martin and Mangels; Abyss, David Weddle and Jeffrey Lang;  and Shadow, by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. All four novels deal with the same autonomous intelligence department, although by the late 24th century it’s degenerated into a far less innocent organization. 
  • The Good that Men Do on Memory Alpha
  • Martin and Mangels on Memory Alpha
  • Enterprise Relaunch on TvTropes
Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Booking through Thursday: Foreign

Posted on October 21, 2010 by smellincoffee

Booking through Thursday asks:  What is a book from a country outside your own that you love?

One of my favorite books is the autobiography of Emilie Carles, called A Life of Her Own. A professor of mine assigned it for either a French history or general European history class, as it depicts the advance of modernity — particularly, industrialization and nationalism — into a mountain village in the French alps.  I didn’t expect much from the biography of a farming woman, but it changed my life.

Emilie Carles has lead an inspirational life, for one. At an early age she developed a love for books and reading and began to spurn tradition. She became a true freethinker, and her values advanced accordingly.  This confirmed my belief that the morals of reason and empathy are not only superior to those of custom and religion, but  that they are universal, and that anyone can realize them.

Secondly, Carles broadened my political understanding. Before reading her, my perceptions of various political viewpoints were primitive: I thought communism and socialism were always linked to large, intrusive governments (like the USSR and China), and knew nothing of anarchism beyond a conceptions of bomb-throwing and worship of chaos. As the Great War drags on, Carles writes of her thoughts and those of her relatives, and they do not see it as a great patriotic struggle against evil. They see the war as the product of selfish aristocrats, ever covetous of glory and land, and they resent the deaths of so many people at the orders of   the land-owning elite.

They become radicalized in a populist sense, desiring that people rule themselves and have control of their own destinies: through Carles’ words, in sharing her opinions and those of her friends and family, I realized there was an entire spectrum of thinking I’d never heard of — that socialism and communism could be rooted as firmly in democracy, and that anarchism had less to do with revelry and disorder and more to do with the stern, principled lives of men like Henry David Thoreau.

I embarrassed myself for a year after reading this book, because I could not help thanking my professor profusely for having us read it, so great was its impact on my understanding of the world.

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

This Week at the Library (20 October)

Posted on October 20, 2010 by smellincoffee

This past week at the library was a productive and enjoyable one. I’m caught up on the Voyager relaunch, having read Unworthy, and I also read a collection of short stories featuring the old Voyager family. Beyer’s best work for my money is still Full Circle,  but her humor and character drama continue to stun me.

Rapt’s one of the better books I’ve read recently, touching on attention’s role in personal happiness, morality, creativity, and personal relationships. I picked it up because of my interests in psychology, but found it more interesting from a mindfulness point of view.

Edith Hamilton’s Roman Way is her sequel to The Greek Way, and I read it to follow up on Caesar and Christ. Hamilton’s a writer from the old school, but Roman devotees will enjoy her attempt to find the Roman character via Rome’s plays, letters, and histories.

I also followed up on a recommendation from a friend and read The Good Guy. The opening plot — a man who is mistaken for a hitman by a murder contractor, and then mistaken for the contractor by the hitman — seemed interesting enough, but Koontz tells the story in chapters that alternate between the Good Guy and the hitman. The hitman is a sociopath, and being in his head creeped me out.

On a whim I also picked up The Worlds of DS9 volume 2 to touch base with the DS9 Relaunch. Years ago I thought the book unreadable, but I clipped through it in a couple of days. The book contains two novellas, one set on Trill and the other on Bajor. Trill’s plot was most interesting, being a political/crime mystery that gives Ezri room to become her own character. Bajor”s novella was interesting, but mostly sets the stage for further novels.

I had intended to combine the weekly recap with selected passages from the books, but I…forgot to write any down before I turned the books to the library. I’ve been losing interest in the weekly recaps as of late, and would be interested in knowing if anyone finds them of any use — I now only look forward to the recap post for the quotations and introduction of next week’s list, myself.

Potential Reads for Next Week:

  • The Seventy Great  Mysteries of the Natural World. I’ve been gazing at this book hungrily all week, picking it up and putting it back down again because I know it will be magnificent, so much so that I don’t want to spoil the anticipation by actually reading the book. It’s a bit like wishing I could have my cake and eat it, too. 
  • I’m finally going to finish The Good that Men Do by Martin and Mangels. The poor book has been twice preempted by other book series, but I’m a hundred pages away from finishing it. Even if a stranger knocks on my door and says, “Hello. Would you like this box of Trek Relaunch novels, none of which you have read?” I‘m going to finish it. 
  • A teacher of mine mentioned that she’s reading Charles’ Portis True Grit, a novel that inspired the John Wayne movie of the same  name. I started reading it in the library, and it appears to have some  of the film’s more memorable scenes included.
  • Finally getting around to The Devil’s Punchbowl by Greg Iles. Should be a doozy, if it’s anything like Iles’ previous work.
  • The War of the Worlds by H.G.Wells is a “classic” that I’m revisiting: I don’t think I’ve ever read the actual work, just abridged versions for kids.
  • The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War by James Bradley,  which explores the effects of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Cruise of the Great White Fleet” and its impact on foreign relations….especially with Japan.
  • I may extend my recess from the Story of Civilization for a week more, and I may try to read a chapter or two from The Age of Faith. 
Posted in Reviews | Tagged | Leave a comment

Worlds of Deep Space Nine (Volume 2)

Posted on October 19, 2010 by smellincoffee

Worlds of Deep Space Nine, Volume 2: Trill and Bajor
© 2005 Martin, Mangels, and Kym
380 pages

On the cover:  Nicole de Boer as Lieutenant Ezri Dax; Avery Brooks as Captain Benjamin Sisko.

S.D. Perry’s Unity ended the first major phase of Star Trek relaunch literature, bringing multiple Deep Space Nine storylines together and capping them off with the assassination of Bajor’s prime minister on the eve of its admission into the United Federation of Planets. The assassin, working on behalf of the government of Trill, operated on the concealed knowledge that the minister was posessed by a parasite genetically related to the symbionts of the Trill homeworld.  Trill’s government, highly protective of the symbionts that so many of its leaders are joined to, was desperate to hide the symbiont/parasite connection.  In the midst of this chaos, Benjamin Sisko returned to the land of the living just in time for the birth of his daughter; previously, in “What you Leave Behind”, he vanished into the etheral realm of the Prophets, aliens who occupy a nearby wormhole and are the objects of Bajoran religion.

Worlds of Deep Space Nine is a three-part series that explore the aftermath of Unity while TNG launched its own arc which eventually culiminated in Destiny. The book contains two novellas that are set four days apart from the other and on their respective worlds. In Unjoined, authors Martin and Mangels depict a Trill on the edge of chaos. Its streets are filled with citizens brimming with anger, demanding full transparency from the government — and some, giving into fear, demanding an end to the custom of joining. After Lieutenant Ezri Dax and Lieutenant Commander Julian Bashir are called to Trill to give testimony at an official inquiry into Trill’s role in the assassination, terrorist groups target the symbionts and government officials while Dax discovers buried history that may forever change Trill.  While the political story and cultural examinations are interesting enough, Unjoined is most notable for me in seeing Lieutenant Dax come into her own as a character: she’s finally adjusted to being joined, and her experiences since then are setting her on a path away from her old life.

Fragments and Omen‘s major theme is adjustment: Bajor is now a member of the Federation,  and while the general populace is looking forward to the future, there are others who fear Bajor’s individuality will be left behind. Jake Sisko is also trying to find a life for himself now that his father has returned — and Ben Sisko believes that he was sent back because Bajor is about to undergo a crisis.  While Kym’s novella is perfectly enjoyable to read for DS9 fans, it lacks the active punch of Martin and Mangels: it’s more a prolouge for what is to come, though readers are only teased by this in the last chapter of the book.

I haven’t read a novel from the Deep Space Nine relaunch for five years: I bought this and another book in the “Words of Deep Space Nine” series, but found both too dense to get in. I’m apparantly better at reading now, for this read was smooth sailing. In the five years that have past, I’ve forgotten most of the details of Unity, but was able to piece them together from this book’s infrequent exposition. While Unjoined is the Dax-and-Bashir show, Fragments and Omens draws from most of DS9’s officer ensemble plus a Bajoran politician or two.

Good read for general Trek readers, particularly Unjoined. As said, Fragments and Omens is mostly prologue.

Related:

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Teaser Tuesday (19 October)

Posted on October 18, 2010 by smellincoffee

It’s that teasin’ Tuesday time again!

Tim was getting a bad vibe. Not a look-out-he’s-a-werewolf kind of vibe, just a feeling that the guy might be tedious. 

The stranger said, “I jumped out of an airplane with my dog.” 

On the other hand, the best hope of a memorable barroom conversation is to have the good luck to encounter an eccentric. 

(p. 10-11, The Good Guy. Dean Koontz.)

[Sisko] reached into the crib and scooped his daughter up in his arms. Check for leakage, the Old Dad instincts told him. Structural integrity may be compromised. 

(p. 204, Worlds of Deep Space Nine volume 2: Trill and Bajor.) Quotation is from J. Noah Kym’s Fragments and Omens.

Posted in General | Tagged | 10 Comments

The Roman Way

Posted on October 17, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Roman Way
© 1932 Edith Hamilton
281 pages

                                        Slave: He saw the girl.
                                        Master: Oh, hell! How could he?!
                                        Slave: …with his eyes.
                                        Master: But how, you fool?
                                        Slave: By openin’ ’em! (“Merchant”, Plautus)

The Roman Way follows up on the success of Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way, and models itself after that first work of Hamilton’s, in which she used Greece literature to evaluate it. In Roman Way, she draws on the comedic plays of Terence and Plautus, the histories of Caesar, the letters of Cicero, and the poetry of Catullus and Horace among other authors.  The book’s greatest virtue is that Hamilton’s choice to reproduce pages from plays and longer passages from letters allows students of Roman history to connect with that history more directly — to test the waters of literature from another time while protected from confusion by the presence of the author’s commentary. Hamilton’s writing is strong and flourished, conveying a clear affection for the subject: she reads plays originally written in Latin for pleasure.

When generalizing, Hamilton is golden for the lay reader, though the more focused analyses of poetry and literature are likely to find their best audiences in serious students of literature and Roman history. Being a somewhat serious student myself, I found a lot of value here. I enjoyed reading Roman plays and realizing that for all the centuries that have passed, it’s still possible to get a laugh out of them. I found Cicero’s  humility (!) in his letters especially endearing:  sensitive about his constant bragging and the disconnect between his political values and the political choices he made, he frets to his brother:  “What will history be saying of me six hundred years hence?”  I also enjoyed the chapters on Roman romanticism and aesthetic values. Broader narratives forget to see the Romans as people at times, and Roman Way makes good on that. Times pass and values change, and the literature reflects it.

Good follow-up to Caesar and Christ;  Romanophiles and those interested in literary history should find it engaging.

Related:

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Shelfari

Posted on October 17, 2010 by smellincoffee

Earlier this afternoon a friend brought the social community for bookworms (“Shelfari”) to my attention, and I found it hospitable enough to register an account for my use. I liked the idea of being able to survey a virtual bookshelf of everything I’ve read in recent years, so I invested a little time this afternoon in adding everything from the TWATL archives to my shelves.

Okay, maybe more than a little time. Point is, now my Shelfari account has everything I’ve read here on the blog, minus a possible percentage of books that I overlooked. I also added some of the books I read in 2006 and 2007 prior to getting in the habit of raiding nearby libraries on a weekly basis. Because I filled the shelves from most recent to oldest, the most recently added books may be new to you: this blog’s original home was on something called a “MySpace” account and those first posts were copied to my archives when I made the switch to Blogger.

I’m interested in meeting other bloggers and readers who have shared their books on Shelfari; my username there is listed above, and if you want to hunt me down via email address, just tack on @gmail.com. I will continue to update Shelfari in the future with books I’m reading or want to read, and will add a link to the sidebar once I find an appropriate but tidy place to stick it.

Posted in General | 2 Comments