Tales of the Dominion War
Published in 2004, editor Keith DeCandido
370 pages
O’Brien: Engage, retreat, engage, retreat. I tell you, that’s becoming our favorite tune.
Bashir: Well, we’d better think of a new tune fast or the only song we’re going to be singing is “Hail the Conquering Dominion”.
Dax: I wouldn’t start learning those lyrics just yet. (“Favor the Bold“)
If you’ve ever seen an episode of the original Star Trek series, you know the essential formula for most of the rest: a crew of gallant Starfleet personnel travel through the galaxy, solving a mystery or problem every week amid playful banter and warm idealism. These standard series each have their strengths and weaknesses, but their foundation is the same. Deep Space Nine stands alone: set in an outpost at the outskirts of the Alpha Quadrant, its stories are not weekly events but large arcs. The Dominion War was one such arc: the series’ second season introduced a vast trade federation known as the Dominion, protected by super-soldiers whom everyone feared. The Dominion matured through the show’s early seasons, eventually being realized in full as a vast empire controlling much of the Gamma Quadrant — a region of the galaxy so far removed from the Alpha Quadrant that only a stable wormhole providing a shortcut from Deep Space Nine to the fringes of the Dominion’s borders made traveling between the two feasible. A group of aggressive shape-shifting xenophobes known as the Founders created the Dominion to protect them from outside persecution, and they used their empire to establish order by subordinating weaker powers. In season five, the Dominion set its sights on subduing the various powers of the Alpha Quadrant, resulting in a war that lasted several seasons and culminated only at the series’ finale.
Tales of the Dominion War is set during that time, in which the Dominion fights and nearly destroys the Federation as well as the Klingon and Romulan Empires. The book begins with a tribute to Deep Space Nine, crediting it for making Trek literature more varied: in breaking with the format of the original series and The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine allowed authors to explore the entire galaxy, creating book series about characters and powers not mentioned in the television shows. Many of the characters from various series produced following Deep Space Nine‘s beginning make appearances here, like Michael Jan Friedman’s Stargazer crew and Peter David’s New Frontier cast and ship. The stories here not not just set aboard ships, though; authors take us to Earth, when Breen ships stage a surprise attack and level Starfleet Command; to Romulus, where Ambassador Spock watches as Romulan politicians and generals struggle for command of Romulus’ fate, and decide whether or not it shall enter the war; and to a world of the Klingon empire, in which a one-armed Klingon fights off a ship of Jem’Hedar warriors on foot. There’s even a story about Shinzon, the foe from Nemesis who led Reman combat troops on special operations, one that sets the stage for Nemesis. Scotty and McCoy also have a day in the sun, although the Voyager crew is excluded — having spent the war lost in the Delta Quadrant. The collection’s captstone story (“Requital”) is the only one that includes Deep Space Nine‘s characters: a young Federation officer assigned to guard the Founder who instigated the Dominion War and the slaughter that follows struggles with his desire for vengeance while reliving in his mind some of the war’s most vicious battles.
For my money this book is strong indeed; I’ve never been able to enjoy New Frontier or Klingon stories before, but the authors of those respective stories kept my interest. David’s New Frontier story is one of the few stories in the collection that comment on war itself — while his comments on the way emotional appeals are used to glorify, promote, sell, and maintain wars, the collection’s final story addresses the way individual psyches are warped by battle. The rest simply explore themes common in Star Trek war stories: bravery under fire, idealistic determination, the value of quick wits. This is a superb collection of Trek stories that is an easy recommendation to Trek fans.
Related:
Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the American-Phillipine War
© 1992 Mark Twain; edited by Jim Zwick.
256 pages
In 1898, the burgeoning United States declared war on the Spanish Empire and set forth to ‘liberate’ the island of Cuba, which Spain held. The resulting victory netted the US government Cuba, Guam, Wake Island, and a few other odds and ends — including the opportunity to buy the Phillipine Islands from Spain. Both Cuba and the Phillipine islands posessed native populations eager to rule themselves, not that the US or Spain gave them much notice. Filipinos mounted an insurrection against their self-aclaimed new masters in 1899, and the bloodshed would not end until seven years had passed. Some Americans saw the removal of Spain from the western hemisphere as a fulfillment of the Monroe Doctrine, or as the beginning of a great crusade to spread Republicanism throughout the world. Other Americans were not so sure the US invasion of the Phillipines, and its occupation of the ceded Spainish territories was a good thing: they saw it as a naked land-grab. Mark Twain of the Anti-Imperialist Leauge was one such American. He campaigned vigorously against the war, and his thoughts regarding the war are collected here.
Weapons of Satire pulls together speeches, articles, jotted-down private thoughts, satiricial essays, and a book review of Twains into this anthology, one that makes Twain’s view of the war abundantly clear. At first he viewed the war as a good cause, wanting to see his country rid the western hemisphere of imperial powers and make way for democracies. Upon seeing the way American generals, politicans, and businessmen interacted with Cuba and the Phillipines, Twain concluded that this was nothing more than the expansion of imperialism, under a new flag — one with industrial might and not just the gold of days gone past to back it up. Twain sees the war as a moral failure on the part of the United States: instead of spreading democracy, it is expanding itself like the European states of the day, in the same manner as England and Germany. It is commiting great abuses against the people of the Phillipines, even engaging in massacre. This imperial growth will not only harm the annexed territories, but undermine the American vision: the ideal of the Republic will be undone by these dreams of empire, for Twain believed no democracy could survive prolonged war and imperial ambition. Monarchy, or some form of authoritarianism, would be the inevitable result. He viewed the war as corruptive — not only of the American system of government, and of hope for the future, but of individual idealism. Patriotism, he notes, has been been perverted:
There are two kinds of patriotism — monarchical patriotism and republican patriotism. In the one case the government and the king may rightfully furnish you their notions of patriotism; in the other, neither the government nor the nation is privilege to dictate to any individual what the form of his patriotism shall be. The gospel of monarchical patriotism is “The King can do not wrong”. We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change to the wording;”Our country, right or wrong!” We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had – the individual’s right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he by himself) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away, and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque work and laughable word, Patriotism.
Unfortunately, Twain’s words are still applicable today: questioning the moral integrity of the United States’ actions abroad in the late 20th century and in the past decade is kin to blasphemy: ‘supporting the troops’ apparently means ‘letting the government do with them as it wills’. I wonder what Twain would make of corporation-dominated media and the persistently mighty influence of the US’s military industries on its foreign and domestic policies.
The Magicians
© Lev Grossman 2009
416 pages
Quentin Coldwater is an unenthused high school student on the verge of depression, feeling out of place in life itself. Suffering from tedium, loneliness, and unrequited love, Quentin often finds escape in the magical world of Fillory and Further, a series of children’s books that bear a remarkable resemblance to C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. . That all changes when Quentin receives his acceptance letter from Hogwart’s School of Wizardry and Witchcraft , chasing a wind-blown note from a book given to him by a mysterious stranger, passes through an invisible portal and finds himself in a bewildering place — a place of moving topiaries, where New York’s winter has been replaced by a warm summer. Upon seeing a stranger waiting for him, he asks: “Is this Fillory?”
Quentin’s discovery is not of Fillory, but of the grounds of Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, an elite private college for young people with a penchant for magic. Quentin, or “Q” as his friends call him, sees Brakebills as what he’s been waiting for all of his life: a place of excitement and meaning. Teenage Q will, in the five years he spends obtaining his magical education at Brakebills, find a kind of happiness he’s never known before. He disowns his old life, even ignoring his former friends in favor of his Brakebills peers. But something seems wrong: Brakebills is not a land of excitement and meaning. He enjoys life with his friends, yes, and enjoys learning magic — a venture consisting mostly of memorizing recitations and arcane hand gestures — but there’s no Lord Voldemort to fight, no Forbidden Forest to explore — no great adventure to be caught up in. The varied fantasy creatures of worlds like Fillory are absent from Brakebills: it can claim a pixie for a teacher, but that’s about it. His graduation from the academy comes as an unpleasant surprise, and afterwards — as a young twenty-something — he tries to find substance in a life of sex, drugs, booze, and parties.He searches for some great meaning behind his life, but remains restless. The motony is broken when a Brakebills student who had fallen off of everyone’s radar arrives and breathlessly announces that he’s found Fillory.
A magic realm with witches to fight is just the thing for a group of young magicians who have no purpose in life, but what Quentin and his friends find is scarcely fun: “adventure” is terrifying and costly, and the perils to be experienced may just make Q realize that he may not necessarily want to live with what he’s wanted all his life. The monsters of Fillory are far more sinister than trolls and armies of mooks.
I checked Lev Grossman’s The Magicians out after seeing an excerpt from it in reader Joy’s Tuesday Teaser, and enjoyed it immensely. Grossman’s narrative is charming and funny, although the book becomes progressively darker as the magicians age. Thinking of Harry Potter is — given the setting of a magical school with a deliberately English feel — unavoidable, and Grossman refers to the series numerous times himself, along with The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. The characters themselves are conscious of Potter, often joking about the few similarities. “I’m going to get my Quiddich uniform” says one, before they begin playing a magical game of their own.
The Magicians made for a fun read at first, and matured into something more thoughtful with its characters. Grossman’s setting is vast and full of little details that make me wonder if he’ll write more. I’d certainly read more, but alas! I have no access to his Codex. I’ll remember this most for its early charm and humor: the darker ending was a bit of a downer. I would recommend it to to most fantasy readers, although The Magicians isn’t standard fantasy — more a story about the difficulties of coming to terms with life as newly-fledged adult that has a magical background.
The Other Side of Selma
© 2001 R.B. “Dickie” Williams
103 pages
Years ago while roaming aimlessly in my home library, I spotted a little collection of stories about Selma during the fifties and sixties. I read and enjoyed it, as the book added depth to the downtown area for me. Selma was almost a different town in those days, the economy primarily main-street: now the town’s old commerical thoroughfare consists of abandoned buildings with boarded up windows, shopping being down on a depressing stretch of highway flanked by fields of concrete and boxes with bright neon signs. Part of the decay is simply the passage of time, but the closing of Selma’s air force base dealt it a serious blow. This summer I’ve been walking the streets of downtown, pondering each building in turn, thinking about the human stories that have played out through the years. I realized recently that revisiting The Other Side of Selma — an “old fogey’s” recollections of the Selma-that-was would be appropriate for this summer tour.
Williams’ style is simple: he shares funny, mysterious, touching, romantic, and outlandish stories to the reader about the people who lived in Selma during those days. No reference is given to the town’s turmoil during the Civil Rights movement: this portrays Selma’s Andy Griffith existence. Selma had a blind bookseller who could feel dollar bills and tell you their denomination, a barber who claimed to speak Russian fluently until he was embarrased by a visiting Russian-language professor, and a man who was known for his barbequed chicken because he did clean-up at the local underground cockfighting club. There are many little stories in here that will give me a slight smile whenever I drive through town and see various settings for these stories: for instance, when I return to Mabry Street to finish taking pictures of historic architecture there, I will know under one particular house there once were a barreful of ruined and water-swollen peas, dumped there by a newlywed woman who wanted to hide her first botched attempt at cooking black-eyed peas from her husband, so she and her friend threw them in an unoccupied house’s basement.
Like Memories of Old Cahaba, this has somewhat limited appeal — although Williams’ stories are entertaining enough by themselves even outside the context of Selma that casual readers looking for a few nostalgic chuckles will enjoy this, particulartly if they hail from this time period or the mid-century South.
The Roving Mind
© Isaac Asimov 1983
350 pages
The Roving Mind collects sixty-two essays by Isaac Asimov, the majority scientifically-themed, along with several tributes to the late Asimov by friends and comrades who knew him well. The essays by men like Paul Kurtz and Carl Sagan update a volume originally printed in the early eighties, and the essays reflect the preceding period, particularly the seventies. Asimov’s thoughts on the future are particularly interesting, as he seems to predict consumer-specific advertising and entertainment (as in TiVo and Google) and a computer-oriented marketplace that allows customers to buy goods and reserve hotel rooms through their private consoles. Other essays take on religious dogma and political matters of interest (censorship), warn of the dangers of increasing population, reflect on the human condition, and share Asimov’s thoughts on the increasing role of technology in everyday lives, particularly in his own: he devotes three essays to his new-fangled Word Processor. Interesting topics abound, as is par for the course given Asimov’s many varied interests, and his explanations are both lucid and witty with plenty of eccentric charm. Especially notable for me:
“For the third time within the memory of man, the town became a deserted village.The scenes of 1826 were repeated. The doors of the business houses were all closed and locked, the stately homes were abandoned and deserted. Flowers again bloomed untended in the lovely yards and grass covered the principal streets. An air of loneliness and desolation impossible to describe encompassed the place. Where wealth and fashion a few short years before held unlimited sway, ruin and desolation now danced in high carnival, and one could be exclaim: “Time! Time! How inscrutable are thy changes!”
I don’t do memes very often here, mostly because if I started I wouldn’t know where to stop. If I tried to follow every meme from ShouldBeReading, for instance, I’d be so busy typing I wouldn’t have time to read. (As it is, I only do the one, and that’s mostly because I like quotations.)
I got this, though, from Seeking a Little Truth.
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This week…
I started off with Michael Jan Friedman’s Death in Winter, the origin of The Next Generation‘s “relaunch” in novelizations. With the Enterprise still being repaired following Nemesis, Picard is tasked with carrying out a secret mission in Romulan space that his dear — and beloved — friend Dr. Crusher was captured in attempting to accomplish. The novel pushes Picard and Crusher closer together while giving the reader a healthy dose of adventure and Romulan politics. Enjoyable, as I would expect from Friedman.
Next up, Around the World in 80 Days, a classic tale of Gilded Age adventure. Following a bet with his friends that he could — in 1872 — circumnavigate the globe in less than three months. Mr. Phineas Fogg sets off to travel the world by sea, by train — and by elephant, if necessary. He does this while being chased by a detective who’s pinned him for a bank robbery, and must face the perils of nature and angry Indians. It’s a delightful little read that’s brimming with 19th century optimism in technology and the future.
I also read Dinosaur Lives, a memoir of sorts by Dr. John Horner that recounts his experiences in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which he began pushing the conception of dinosaurs beyond cold-blooded “big lizards” and placed them more accurately within their evolutionary context. The book also gives readers an idea as to how paleontologists do their craft.
My last read for this week — finishing up after three weeks — was Charles Dickens’ classic A Tale of Two Cities, a story of revolution and redemption. Thick with language at times, but worth wading through given my interest in the French revolution and my shared horror with Dickens at the inhumanity of it.
Pick of the Week: Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days.
Upcoming Reads:
This weekend should be fun– I’ve many choices.
Reading Freely 
