Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Anthony Ryan, Aromathus, Blood Song, books, Fantasy, Jeff, Journal, Novel, Offringa, Personal, Spec-Fic
At Long Last!!!!
For those of you who have been reading this journal for a while, you might remember that right after last Christmas I posted an entry talking about several genre things I wished to see in 2014. I can now say that one of the things I wished for has come true: to be hooked into a fantasy series by a new author in the way I remember being in hooked in the past.
First up, I’ll say that it is very rare these days that I judge a book by its cover. This is the Age Of Amazon, after all, where even if we see a new book by a new author that looks really, really good, it behooves us to go home and read the reviews first. No longer do we have to wait for recommendations from our friends, nope: the opinions of hundreds, even thousands, of other spec fic fans are at our fingertips.
This time, though, I was killing time between a successful (i.e I got a report of “you look awesome”) trip to my eye doctor and an RPG session, and so I felt like celebrating. I spent some of that time strolling through a local Barnes and Noble where I saw a couple copies of Anthony Ryan’s novel “Blood Song” sitting on the new books shelf. I examined the cover, skimmed through the book and read a few spots, and thought, “What the heck?” And for the first time since I picked up Steven Erikson’s “Malazan” novels ten years ago, I purchased a new fantasy novel on instinct – and discovered I liked it.
Really liked it.
Or put another way, I’ve found an author who got me to stay up late reading, and I haven’t done that since I discovered Brandon Sanderson.
OK, enough gushing. For those of you who have never heard of Mr. Ryan, I will say that “Blood Song” is, AFAIK, his first novel, and it’s a meaty war fantasy. The main character, Vaelin, begins the story at the tender age of ten. He is left by his father at the door of the chapter house of the “Sixth Order,” which the reader quickly discovers is a sort of Monastic order devoted to “The faith” and skill in combat. In the monastery, he and a group of boys quickly bond together as they suffer through brutal training at the hand of a group of Masters, and by the time they graduate, they are far more skilled at all forms of combat, tracking, and survival than any other eighteen year old warrior, and between his position as the son of a discredited noble and his own native skill, our hero rises to power within his the order.
At this point – roughly third to a half of the way into a 600 + page novel – it is admittedly a pretty typical coming-of-age fantasy tale. However, it is a coming-of-age tale well told. Not only do you come to care about Vaelin and what happens to him, but you also really want to know what happens to his companions and teachers as well.
This is also the point where the book really starts to get really good. Things that are only hinted at in the first couple sections of the book (it is divided into five sections), such as the nature of “The Faith” that the all the main characters follow, his relationship with his disgraced Father, and the lives and back stories of the other characters, begin to weave together. Add in a heavy dose of political intrigue and a touch of well – written romance, and perhaps most interestingly (and that is saying a lot in this tale), a well thought out system of “low magic,” and this tale had me captivated.
Now, as to what the book is not: It is not a tale of high fantasy, ala Robert Jordan, Ray Fiest, or Steven Erickson. Yes, there is magic in the world, but there are no battle wizards lobbing fireballs about. No, this is fantasy along the lines of the best of George R.R. Martin, in that yes, there is magic in the world, but it is hinted at, occurring in the back story and only slowly discovered. It is also done in such a way that you want to keep reading to find out what the heck is going on as Vaelin discovers more about who he is and what magic he has.
It is also not a story for the faint of heart. The training Vaelin and his compatriots undergo is truly, truly brutal, and of the (VERY!) few negative reviews the book has on Amazon, this is the only thing that people really objected to that has any validity. Further, if you (unlike me) dislike well written POLITICAL fantasy, with a good deal of warfare, you might want to skip it as well.
Yet neither of these things compare in any way to the large dose of AWESOME that is Blood Song. This is GREAT book, Aromathians, and I can’t recommend it enough. If you like my writing, or political and military fantasy in general, then this is one to get. Three thumbs up.
Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, Batman, Gotham, Jeff, Journal, Novel, Offringa, Personal, TV
It’s not often that I give a show with as many strikes against before it even starts as Gotham does a chance. After all, it’s about Batman (well, Bruce Wayne and Detective Gordon, at least) – a character those of you who have been reading my ramblings for a long time know I have a love – hate relationship with. Second, it’s not (unlike, say, Agents of Shield) not continuous with either Chris Nolan’s Batman movies or the upcoming Batman vs. Superman. Third, it is a member of my least favorite genre – cop shows. Finally and most egregiously, it’s on FOX – the network where good SF shows go to die (Here’s looking at you, Almost Human).
Yet it got good early press, and it was on right after another show that I have come to really like (Sleepy Hollow), it is a super hero show, and hey – the DVR has a big hard drive. I have to say I’m glad I did.
I must say I was initially upset that it wasn’t continuous with the other DC properties, true. I guess this is just evidence that DC isn’t as, shall we say, visionary, as Marvel. Of course, their propensity to make every super hero movie property that they own into mediocre at best, but more often simply into bombs, doesn’t help. Yet when they had the chance to borrow (steal) a page from Marvel’s book with Gotham, and tell a story tied in a larger collective franchise, they didn’t. Nope; Gotham is the last thing we needed: yet another Batman origin story.
When I started watching the premiere, it appeared as if my first instincts were correct. The pilot began with the scene we have all seen or read numerous times before: a seemingly random mugger holds up the Waynes as they come out of the theater, robbing them and then for no apparent reason shooting the adults.
This is where the similarities end, though. First, a young cat burglar is hanging from a fire escape and sees the entire thing – very obviously our first introduction to Catwoman. Later on in the episode, we meet the young daughter of the man corrupt police officers frame to “solve” the murder of the Waynes – a young red headed girl named “Ivy.” A very strange but sycophantic mob enforcer with the strangely apt nickname of “Penguin” also makes an appearance. And I’m pretty sure that the geeky – looking research technician at Gotham PD will become the Riddler.
Yep. An origin story, with all the pieces in place, yet done differently enough to make the show interesting.
Yet despite having all the usual suspects present, this is a very different version of the Batman origin mythos, for Bruce Wayne is a bit character in this series (at least so far). Instead, this is well and truly about Detective Gordon. Even less than Agents of Shield, this isn’t really a super hero show at all. Instead, like last season’s aforementioned Almost Human, this is a cop show.
I generally avoid cop shows like the plague, finding them to be either unrealistic, campy, or both, but for whatever reason, this one works. Sure, everything in the three episodes so far hasn’t really been about the criminal plot lines involved, being about character origins of our hero and his foes. Yet it is still unmistakably a cop show. Bruce Wayne and his gadgets aren’t here at all. What is here are simple mysteries aplenty.
OK, maybe not so simple. Where else but Gotham City would you have a human trafficking story where the villain is working for a mob boss and the kids are being captured via means of a drug sold by the company that owns Arkham prison? Yeah, it’s a cop show. But it’s not your ordinary cop show.
Well, I could go on and say lots more plot related stuff, but… Yeah. I hope DC finally gets it right, and that this show, like Agents of Shield, is given a chance to grow. It’s already better – far better – than AoS was after three episodes, and I am curious to see where the writing takes it. Add in clever writing, an interesting (and attractive, to be sure) cast, and a good deal of old-fashioned “everyone in Gotham works for the mob and everyone is so corrupt that Detective Gordon and Alfred Pennyworth are the only two honest people in town” angst, and yeah… it works. It may not be as interesting as AoS, and it may not be covering any new ground, but it’s interesting enough. Give it a shot if you haven’t.
At least until Fox cancels it in favor of “Dancing With Karaoke Singing Chef’s.” 🙂
Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, Disney, Jeff, Journal, Novel, Offringa, Personal, Rebel, Star Wars
Once upon a time The Mouse made a movie based on a fairy tale about a young thief. This tale was about a young man who gets caught stealing food, and is saved by more powerful people (and beings). In the process, the main character has lots of adventures, finds love with a beautiful princess, quips lots of snappy one-liners, meets nobility, develops friendships, and even picks up an intelligent companion that to the rest of the world looks like just another dumb…. droid.
Oh, you thought I was taking about Aladdin? Huh. So did I. Then I realized something: Star Wars: Rebels is pretty much Aladdin meets Star Wars.
It’s strange how what goes around comes around. A few years ago, the single largest criticism I heard of Christopher Paolini’s Eragon books was that he mish-mashed Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. I both heard and read repeated comment after repeated comment: Lucas and the Tolkien family should sue for copy right infringement, fans should be embarrassed to go see these movies (let alone read the books) – and worse. The vehemence of the criticism was such that I came to imagine a lawsuit for plagiarism would soon be in the works.
When I saw the movie, I had to admit, yeah, the criticisms were valid; the movie really was a mish mash of those two stories. Yet… it was also simply another version of the classic heroic coming-of-age hero who saves the world tale, of which Star Wars and Tolkien are both fine examples. So, of course there are going to be similarities. Throw in that the author was a little kid when he wrote the first book, and the story is actually pretty impressive. Derivative? Sure. But that doesn’t make it a bad story, as all authors borrow to at least some degree. And further, how often don’t we see some author getting tagged as “The Next Tolkien!” or “Star Wars for a new generation!”
This means that I find the comments I’ve been reading about Disney’s new Star Wars: Rebels vastly amusing, for as I said in my intro, it really is Star Wars meets Aladdin. The main character – Ezra – is a self proclaimed Street Rat. He is caught by the heroes / Empire stealing food. He meets a pretty princess / demolitions expert (in gaudy pink Madalorian armor, no less) and a mentor with special powers (Caden). They convince him to join a cause larger than himself, not to save the galaxy, but to save his own life and family.
Hey, you know what else this sounds like? The original Star Wars movie – Episode Four. Yep. Not only does this sound like Aladdin, it’s pretty much a re-telling of the original movie as well, except the role of Luke Skywalker is now being played by Aladdin.
Heck, they even DRAW Ezra such that he looks like Aladdin. Hrmmmmm.
So the thousand dollar question is: Is it any good? The fact that it is derivative isn’t a strike against it in and of itself, as I said, but the overlap is pretty heavy. For the first third of the pilot movie I wasn’t sure what I was watching – Aladdin, Episode four, or a new pilot. Further, the artwork has room for improvement. It’s generally good, but… the Wookies look AWFUL. Worse than awful, in fact – whoever drew them should be unceremoniously fired. Quickly.
And, as I said, it is pretty much a straight re-telling of Episode 4. It’s not just some scenes or even the general plot. Nope. It’s also music (the TIE fighter battle as the Falcon leaves the Death Star is used verbatim as the heroes ship leaves the Star Destroyer is used, making the comparison stronger), and dialogue – Ben’s speech about the nature of the force is used verbatim at the end of the pilot.
Yet a strange thing happened halfway in through: I started to forget the flaws, and get wrapped up in the story. Sure, it was borrowing perhaps too heavily, but the story it was borrowing (copying?) is a really, really good story. So when the climax comes around, and Caden reveals to the bad guys what the audience already knows (that he’s a Jedi)… yeah. Pretty good. And when he pulls out his lightsaber, tells his band of rebels to get behind him, and basically says “I got this” as he stares down twenty stormtroopers… and then the baddies back down?
Pretty awesome.
So, yeah. It has room for improvement. But what new show doesn’t? Yet it has the money and the marketing of the mouse behind it, so I hope that like Agents of Shield, it will have time to develop. Is it as good as the Clone Wars TV show was? No; at least not yet. OTOH, Clone Wars wasn’t very good at first, and it was also very up and down as well.
So give it a shot. It’s got potential, and is at least as entertain as the prequel movies were – perhaps more so. Three and a half out of five stars.
Filed under: 1 | Tags: Aromathus, Axenar, Fanfic, Jeff, Journal, Novel, Offringa, Personal, Star Trek
It is not often that I come across a piece of “fan fiction” on the internet (or anywhere else, for that matter) that impresses me a great deal (despite my own Starfire writings falling into this category). Such writings or projects are famous for placing characters in improbable situations, saying or doing things the character would NEVER say, usually (it seems) to place a fan “avatar” character into a romantic encounter with one of the real characters.
This is as true (more true?) of Star Trek as anything else. In fact, if I were forced to categorize them, many of the Trek novels I read as a kid would even fall into these categories – placing various characters of the authors creation into romantic encounters with either Kirk or Spock.
The transition from fan fic to fan vid hasn’t improved the situation, IMHO. Periodically I see links on forums or Facebook that say “Watch this!” Yet it seems that every time I do, I am disappointed. Usually it is the acting that falls short, and almost as often I’ll see one such as one I gave a cursory glance to earlier today: where some aspiring artist shows off their skill rendering their favorite fan designed starship flying around a starscape doing… nothing. Sure, I get it. You can render a Constitution class starship in glorious detail. But… so? I really don’t feel the need to watch your 3-D video of the USS Lexington as the camera spins around it for four minutes.
OTOH, I recently saw a fan produced movie staring veteran actors of the various Trek shows, and these seem to be getting more popular as we get farther from the last series. This particular one was entitled Star Trek: Renegades, it was an alternate universe concept starring Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, and Tim Russ (among others), so the acting was good – to a point. The problem with that production was not the acting, rather it was the script- and the awful special effects. It didn’t matter that the basic concept was very intriguing (for those of you familiar with classic Trek, Charlie X uses the Guardian of Forever to go back in time and kill Kirk’s mother before Kirk was born. Alternate Reality ensues); the script was so weak and the effects so… cheesy that I could barely make it through it.
Oh, right. I didn’t. I nodded off somewhere in there. Sigh.
All this means that when I saw adds pop on Facebook asking me to like something called “Star Trek: Axenar,” I was not impressed. Another fan movie? Sigh. Yet being the Trek junkie that I am, when I saw a link to a preview of the new “theatrical length movie,” I figured “What the heck?
When I did, I Immediately knew something was different about this project. First, it mined deep into Trek lore, borrowing both from the EU and the classic TV show. Second, the brace of actors in the show are top notch. I was especially intrigued when J.G. Hetzler came on playing not a Klingon general – but a Starfleet admiral. Others are there as well; I’d list names, but if you haven’t seen it, I’ll let you enjoy the surprises as much as I did. Suffice it to say that they are all respected genre actors, many of them Trek veterans.
Most importantly, though, are the effects. Simply put, unlike every other fan film I have ever seen, the effects in this “trailer” (it was twenty minutes long!) were of theatrical quality. The new starships look like a Federation starship should, and old favorites – the aforementioned Constitution class ships – look like something out of the digitally re-mastered edition of Classic Trek that came out a few years ago. No cheesy stop motion models, or even worse, ships that look like someone using Microsoft Paint drew them here. Nope. These ships look good.
As for the plot? Yeah. This is what I always wanted to see as a kid – a full length movie about the first war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. Ship types right out of Starfleet battles, acting performances that are excellent, and a story told in the manner of a Memory Alpha produced war documentary? This is movie I want to see; the twenty minute long preview was too short!
I won’t get into specifics here; I’ll cut this post off a little shorter than usual and just say “Go. Google this. Contribute to the Kickstarter (when the next one comes up, as it appears to me that they are working the Kickstarter in stages). If you’re a Trek fan, or a Sci Fi gamer (especially if your both), you will be impressed.
Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, Jeff, Journal, Novel, Offringa, Personal, Robert A. Heinlein, Science Fiction
When I was a kid, the first serious fiction (I can’t really count all those Star Trek novels I read in 5th and 6th grade as “serious”…) were the early novels of Tom Clancy. Sure, I had read plenty of Trek novels, and some Star Wars movie novelizations, but the first real, “adult” novel I remember reading was The Hunt for Red October. It was at that time that my older brother, who got me into Star Trek and all things science fiction, saw me reading Clancy’s book and told me “If you like that, you ought to read this,” and pulled Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Footfall off of his shelf. With that, my love of hard SF was born.
I read a lot of books from his collection over the years, and most of them were written by Niven and Pournelle, as well as a large number of Isaac Asimov’s robot novels. Yet the largest number of books in his collection were ones that – with one notable exception – I sadly never touched, those by Robert A. Heinlein.
That one exception, however, is a doozy – Starship Troopers. Sure, my brother also recommended that novel to me, and it didn’t hurt that a decent movie (but truly AWFUL version of the book) came out while I was in college (although I thankfully had read the book twice by then), yet to this day I still consider that book one of the three greatest SF novels I have ever read (along with Niven / Pournelle’s novels The Mote in God’s Eye and The Legacy of Heorot).
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of reading Starship Troopers – well, you should. But if you haven’t, don’t be mislead by the hatchet job movies, from the original ’97 movie (which at least passingly resembles the book) through a series of increasingly awful sequels. No, those are Sci Fi shoot-em-ups that miss the point of the novel entirely: a political commentary on what a citizen should do in a democracy. As a student of social studies and poly sci major, this book struck home to me. Rights are rights because we do something with our lives. People must work for the greater good and be productive members of society, not simply be born.
As an aside, this is why I find Verhoven’s movie to be, well, offensive. Heinlein was a liberal democrat, even a socialist in his early life, so when Verhoven made the movie without reading the book “because it was fascist,” well…. suffice it to say I wanted to beat him for how badly he had missed the point of one of my favorite books.
But I digress. The reason I never picked up any of the other Heinlein novels on his shelf, despite the fact that he had around fifty or so novels by him, was the fact that they were, well…. old. Many of them dated from when he was a kid, and so by the time I started reading them, many were over twenty years old, and had that old, browned, weathered look that only a cheap-but-old paperback book has. Add in the number of them (I didn’t know where to start); well, even after I inherited them upon his death, they are now sitting on my shelf, doubly loved but still unread.
So when I stumbled across an ad on Amazon for the second volume full length biography of the great master, I knew I had to read it. I am glad I did.
I will say that I have so far read only the first volume, which ends with the failure of his marriage and the marriage to the women who would be his wife for the last forty years of his life, but even that has been eye opening. Sure, most of his novels were written after he turned forty, but volume one is both an easy read and very enlightening: Heinlein is not who I imagined him to be, at least in his personal life. I suppose that’s what I get from forming my opinion based on one book 🙂
What he was is a story teller. Sure, he was a naval officer before tuberculosis forced him to retire in his mid-twenties (which is why his military SF rings so true), but he was also a politician, an engineer, and a theorist of soon to be science-fact. Furthermore, he was violently ant-communist and fascist, and pro-American, to the point that he (in several quoted letters) states that his religion is the promise of America; even America itself. Factor in that he was writing at the dawn of (even before) the space age; yeah. I can see how he can be given the mantle of the author of modern science fiction.
He was also prolific. HIs naval pension helped, but through the great depression, he was an author, writing tales for science fiction magazines that no longer exist, living from tale to tale and paycheck to paycheck. The number of short stories that he produced is very different from the way that authors write today, for IMHO, the short story is a lost art.
More than anything, he was a character. I found it most interesting to read his own words, his letters to family and friends. This allows the reader to get into his head in a way that I found fascinating, to understand why he wrote what he wrote, and also the myriad of influences on him (and other writers for that matter).
Writing, I’ve heard, is a solitary process, and it’s true. After reading this book, I can feel a little bit what it must of been like for him. He sat pecking away at his typewriter in the same way that I am sitting here at my laptop – both of us writing about other worlds and other times, and I can’t help but feel a little bit more connected to him.
I can’t recommended both volumes of William H. Patterson’s “Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century” enough. Three thumbs up
Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, Geek, hobbies, Jeff, Journal, Novel, Offringa, Personal
A proposition was proposed to me over the weekend, and while on face value it doesn’t seem to be all that ground breaking, it me think quite a bit about how I – how all of us – spend our time these days: We are in the first “age of hobbies.”
When my friend first made that comment to me, it seemed pretty, well, not true – or even relevant. He went on to explain, though: Before the 1970’s, “gaming” as a hobby didn’t exist. D&D came out in the 70’s, and wargaming, the gateway drug for many gamers my age and older, comes from around the same time. Sure, role playing probably existed in some form before then, but certainly not like it does today.
His next question made me think even more – “What did people do for hobbies a hundred years ago? I mean, other than say, fishing, hunting, and reading, what hobbies where there?” That question really threw me for a loop. Even after ten minutes of conversation, I could really only come up with two: sports, and letter writing, and both of those two are both vastly different today. Letter writing is something of a lost art today. As a historian, one of the things that I’ve heard mentioned several times in recent years is how the writing of history will be significantly different in the digital age. Consider the two biographies I have read this summer, one on Robert E. Lee, the other on the Duke of Wellington. Both of these generals left behind voluminous correspondence. Their letters to friends, family, and colleagues left behind an unparalleled “window into their souls” that modern people, despite being more recorded and documented than ever, don’t have. We know far more about what a politician today says and does than ever before, but very little of what they think – for the simple reason that people don’t write letters to each other anymore (sorry, millennials, one sentence e-mails don’t count…)
The other hobby I came up with – sports – is vastly different as well. Sure, people before the “modern age” played sports, and they might have even followed a favorite team (but I wager that didn’t happen much before, say, 1850.) But today? Today people spend billions on sports – from tickets to memorabilia to trading cards to autographs to entrance fees for fantasy leagues – and more. Sports today is a big business, and while more people than ever play sports in some way – more, far more – do something that didn’t happen a hundred years ago: they watch it. You know, plop down in front of the TV with a bag of chips and an adult beverage and just watch. To bring this back around, my friend and I agreed that while hobbies existed in the past, the generally served a productive purpose. Fishing / hunting. Playing a sport. Things like knitting / crocheting / sewing. Reading and letter writing. Things that, in other words, had a purpose beyond killing time and “having fun.”
Look at today, though. While we started out talking about gaming, the conversation morphed quickly, as I said, and we realized that hobbies are now a major industry in and of itself. Think about it: how many of us know many people who derive their living from a hobby? I know sports card shop owners and comic shop owners. I am friends with game designers and writers. I watch sports – especially baseball, which I can have on in the background while I do other things – weekly, if not daily. Even in that small sphere, how many of these people make their living solely on other people “having fun?” Sure, we’ve always had entertainers, but it is a recent – a very recent – development that such a large portion of society makes their money off of other people’s fun. Why is this? It’s simple, oddly enough, and is a combination of two factors: Affluence and technology.
A hundred years ago, most people worked on farms, or in factories and mines, for long hours six (or more) days a week. The sheer amount of physical labor that most people had to perform left people without time – or energy – to do more than enjoy the occasional holiday. Today, though, as labor saving devices have become common place, we have more time, and more money, than ever before. The common person now has the time to play an RPG all day Saturday, and not have their livelihood suffer from it.
Related is the point of technology, and to make this point, I’ll return to the sports example. In 1875, there were professional baseball teams. Yet outside of the fans nearby the parks, the only way to follow a team was to read about it in the newspaper. With the coming of mass information technology, though, that is no longer true. I can sit in my chair at night with the game on TV as I read about the team in a magazine (how old school, I know), then go online and check my fantasy sports teams standings, flip over to a blog, check up-to-the-minutes scores for any team for any game in the country, even as I realize that the team I’m watching isn’t even from this COUNTRY.
Yep. A combination of technology and affluence.
So what does all this mean? Honestly, I’m not sure. Sure, my chosen hobbies of Pen & Paper RPG’s and board wargames aren’t what they used to be, but there are more ways for those of us who do play to stay in contact (and meet up, for that matter) than ever before. And as technology becomes ever more prevalent, I only see this trend continuing. Is this good or bad? I’m not sure. On face value, yeah – it’s awesome. More ways to have fun is great. Yet… I do wonder. With so much money and time going into hobbies, and so many people making their living off of having fun… Yeah. Bread and circuses, people.
Huh. But maybe I’m just a pessimist. Albeit one with lots of games to play. 🙂
Filed under: General Musings
A strange thing occurred to me as I sat around the fire on the boys club canoe trip I helped chaperone last weekend: When we play games, we truly have no – and I mean NO – concept of what it would be like to live in a medieval world.
The first thing that we don’t understand is the smell, the first of which is smoke, but also the smells of the forst and the land (and that of garbage and other less “polite”waste.) The canoe trip we were on took us to northern Michigan, and Friday night it got COLD – 34 degrees Fahrenheit, to be exact. In other words, when 11:30 rolled around, and the fire had burned down, we all rushed for our tents and burrowed into our sleeping bags. It was then that I realized something: I stank. Really bad. But that’s what happens when you spend six hours sitting around a campfire. Yet it was either that, or freeze your gonads off on this balmy “summer” night.
The funny thing is, though, that you don’t even notice it. EVERYONE smells that bad, because we’re all huddled around the fire to get warm. OTOH, I suppose that a little musky smoke smell is better than the alternative of sweltering in the heat. After all, the last bi-annual trip fell during the beginning of the heat wave / drought summer of 2012, and it never really got below 70 at night.
That leads me to my second point: The effects of weather. We allso saw this in how cold the water was. Two years ago, EVERYONE wanted to get dunked or otherwise end up wet; It was in the 90’s both days. This time, with a high around 60, and water temperature around 40… Yeah. No one wanted to get wet (except one brave Dad and a few kids who jumped in and then flew to the fire to get warm), and as for the one canoe that did tip over? Suffice it to say that the Dad in the back of the canoe said he’d “never paddled so hard in his life;” he was genuinely worried that the 5th and 3rd grade age boys with him would get hypothermia. After all, they were two hours by river from camp when they went under (Yes, all involved got back cold but ok. Nothing a warm fire couldn’t handle. 🙂 )
The third thing we underestimate – or even gloss over period – is the effect of all the weight an adventuring / questing party would carry. Sure, adventurers would be in better shape than this sits-behind-a-desk teacher, but even so… It’s very easy for us to haul all our food and supplies, clothes, bedding and “weapons” (aka an axe and a hatchet for splitting fire wood) in a trailer, and we can haul our canoes on another trailer, but an adventuring party? Yeah – unless they have a horse or two, it’s all on their backs. And how many of us object to buying a horse when we play an RPG, complaining that “All they are is monster fodder!”
More to the point, most of us desk jockeys have no clue what it would be like to hike cross country through wilderness all day, every day. We (understandably) treat the crossing of miles as something to fast forward through, wanting only to get to the next encounter. The truth is that hiking all day like that is very tiring – and is in many ways an adventure in and of itself.
The next thing that we gloss over as players is the setting of watches and (more egregiously to me) is how often we gloss over the putting on – or even worse, when the GM lets characters SLEEP in their armor… Sure, it’s possible. Sure, the rules say your fatigued. But, really…. When you get up cold, and its dark, and your fumbling to find stuff with no night vision… You’d be lucky to get your armor on in the four minutes that the rules say it takes. Yet how often don’t we gloss over that fact when we’re attacked at night? One round – wake up. Second round – Fully awake. Third round – armor on – it’s go time!
Really? How many of us are FULLY AWAKE and ready to fight in THIRTY SECONDS? Not me, that’s for sure! Now do that in a strange camp at night, when your under attack? Most of us would be lucky to wake up at all before we got stabbed in our sleep!
I know that playing a truly “realistic” game would be both not fun and pointless. Sure, we are playing a game, and abstraction is necessary to have fun. But next time you play (or read a passage marching through Mordor), stop and think for just a minute that this is a game, and that is has little in common with reality. Reality is colder, harder, smellier – and far more interesting than the game could ever be.
Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, books, Jeff, Journal, Novel, Offringa, Personal, Star Trek
When I was a kid, I read Star Trek novels like they was going out of style. Most of the ones that I read where Classic Trek, but I also took in a large number of Next Gen novels, and even a few of the DS9 variety. Some of them were pretty good, but I remember that the vast majority where pretty…. mediocre. At best. In fact, too many of them were just… bad. Forgettable is being polite; a more accurate description would be that they were glorified fan fic.
When I discovered fantasy novels during college, though, I put Trek novels aside and never looked back. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the ones I’d read; rather, I just outgrew them. All of them were stand alone stories, and like Trek itself, I’d moved beyond such “simple” stories (Yet another thing to “blame” Babylon Five for).
This means that when I read a few months back that the new, “re-launched” Trek novels were serial in nature, and continued the story after the last movie, I was surprised. And when I read that they were actually good, I went on a novel reading binge, reading three different arcs of novels (a total of sixteen novels) over the span of a couple months. Some of them were in fact very good, while most were OK, and some were just pretty… bad. With that in mind, I will briefly give my thoughts on each series.
First up, The Ugly: This series, the arc that continues the story with a series of novels set after Star Trek: Nemesis, is called “The Typhon Pact.” In short, this was an up and down series, with the first novel being very good, a couple being ok, and several of them being just plain awful.
The premise is sound, and one I still like: The Federation’s enemies realize that the Feddies are aggressively expansionist, always colonizing and exploring, and when you throw in their alliance with the Klingons, the “Khitomer Powers” are the preeminent power in the known universe. This means it’s only logical (if a bit unlikely) for the Feddie’s enemies to ally together. From this premise, several novels ensue – from a good old fashioned espionage story, to a tale of galactic power politics to…. a whatever the last novel was about. Other than it being a very poorly written turn on the Cuban missile crisis, I’m not sure what it was about.
In other words, despite its potential to return Trek to its Cold War standoff roots, the series fails to deliver on that potential. There is lots of talking, lots of trying to bring back every major guest star from all of Next Gen and DS9, the series just falls short. Instead, we are “treated” to a novel where Andor secedes from the Federation, and a hapless Captain (still a Captain) Picard waxes on about how he is soooo useful on the bridge of a starship. OK; maybe it’s not that bad, but… Picard dithers and the Tholians convince Andor to secede. Yeah. Not quite as bad as the Missile Crisis take (I agree with one comment that I read about that novel: The author got her start in Fac Fic and should have stayed writing Fan Fic), but…. when one reads a 450 page novel, one expects something to happen. But it never really does.
That’s what happens when book one is very good, and the others….. not so much. Not recommended.
The Mediocre: I started reading this trilogy because many of the comments I read about the Typhon Pact novels said, in short, “OMG! Zoomz!!! These are awesome; you should read these and not the Typhon Pact books!”
Hrm….. In short, I like the concept here as well: A resolution to the endless Borg battles and wars that the Federation has been fighting for the last twenty years of cannon. The problem is that the way the Borg are written, they will eventually win. It doesn’t matter what Starfleet throws at them; the Borg will adapt to anything – including the “Trans-phasic torpedoes” from the Voyager finale. In fact, this led to one of my favorite scenes in the trilogy: Seven of Nine, when asked by the Federation President what to do when the Borg invade again (this time not to conquer, but to annhilate – by 7,000 cubes), simply says “Flee. Most of you will die, but some of you will escape and live. This is your only hope.”
Now, I don’t want to say much more (and thus give spoilers), but I will say that I both enjoyed and hated these books. I agree with the necessity of the plot, and I like the fact that they set up the Typhon pact books (which come later in the timeline). I liked the action / battle sequences, and I felt that the author had a good hand on the characters. OTOH…. Let’s just say I predicted the ending 50 pages into a thousand or so page long trilogy, and the ending was….. Yeah. I’ll just say it punched many of the buttons of what I dislike about Trek. If you’re a completest, or want to know (like me) what happened to the Borg, read these. Otherwise… meh.
The Awesomesauce! OTOH, I picked up the Enterprise: Romulan War/Rise of the Federation novels when I was at the library looking for a Typhon Pact novel. In short, these novels took up where season four of Enterprise left off: The Romulan War. There are four novels that make up this arc; these are followed up by two novels (with more promised) entitled “The Rise of the Federation.” All of them are good; the three authors involved have a VERY good handle on the characters, and the books are absolutely CHOCK full of salutes and tributes to both Enterprise and Classic Trek. Some of them made me laugh, some made me think “I’ll by that!” and some were in fact pretty well done.
In other words, I recommended these books. All (especially the Romulan War books) are wonderful at tying together little bits of cannon (like Scotty’s line in the classic Trek episode “Balance of Terror” about Romulan era war birds being sublight only) and making them not only make sense, but tell a credible, believable – and entertaining – story. In fact, of all the series, the only one I can see myself continuing to read are these Enterprise novels; the six I read where very good, and I recommended them.
Well, all for now. I know these are brief summaries (and short on plot even for this blog), but I hope they give you a little window into the current state of Trek fiction, and I hope you’ll take them into account the next time you need a little Trek brain candy.
Filed under: General Musings | Tags: Aromathus, Brandon Sanderson, Jeff, Journal, Novel, Offringa, Personal, Science Fiction, Spec-Fic, Steelheart
Imagine a world in which people suddenly gain super powers, but unlike all (almost all?) comic book stories, those people chose not to use their powers for good, but for evil. Not to aid their fellow man, but to enslave them. This is the world of Brandon Sanderson’s novel Steelheart.
I know that many of you out there have either a love or hate relationship with Mr. Sanderson; all one has to do to know that is to read the comments and reviews of his concluding Wheel of Time novels. I fall in the “love his work” camp, and was vastly amused at one comment I recently read that bemoaned his epic destruction of Jordan’s legacy. OTOH, he is not without own his eccentricities as a writer (Who isn’t?). Steelheart exhibits many of these tendencies, and does so in a way that makes a young adult novel that is anything but young adult in depth, and only adds to my enjoyment of the book.
To begin: Steelheart starts off with a simple premise: One day “IT” happens. The “it” in and of itself is not important (and isn’t really explained in the book); what is important is that afterword, “Epics” exist. Their powers are as varied and diverse as the “X-verse,” but there is one key difference. All of the epics – ALL of them – realize that they are powerful. Epically powerful. And to quote Lord Acton, power corrupts. Absolutely.
This is all you really need to know about the set-up. The novel moves on from there in the typical hero quest arc – a young boy, downtrodden by the big bad (In this case one of the most – if not the most – powerful of the epics – Steelheart) lives in the city of “Newcago” (aka Chicago). As a boy he watched Steelheart kill his father in a bank shortly after “IT” happened, and he has dedicated his life to studying what makes the epics tick. More importantly, he’s been studying their weaknesses.
All the epics, it seems, have an Achilles heel. Sometimes it is obvious and related to their powers. Sometimes, not so much. Further, the Epics, as you can imagine, go to great lengths to keep those weaknesses his hidden, for without knowing that weakness, it is hard – impossible even – to kill them.
Steelheart is one of these epics. He is invulnerable – think of a cross between Superman and Colossus. His body is made of steel, and as a result, he can’t be shot, or burned, or melted, or…. whatever. Throw in a bunch of equally powerful epics (such as Nightshade, who can make it night 24/7) who serve as his henchmen, and he and his cronies pretty much rule Newcago.
Yet he has his weakness, and our hero thinks he knows it. Remember how he saw Steelheart kill his father? At that time, his Dad picked up a gun and shot Steelheart, and somehow, that bullet penetrated through his steely hide. No one knows how or why, for our villain made sure that everyone who was at that bank ended up dead, and it is only through some good acting that our hero survived. Yet he knows it’s possible to wound the monster, and if you can wound him, you can kill him, and so…. plot ensues.
To tell more would start to go into spoiler country, so I’ll stop here. I will say this: the concept that Mr. Sanderson embraces is one I have thought about myself: What would most people – or, closer to home – what would I do – if I had a superpower? Would I be like Gandalf, throwing the temptation to use the power for ill aside, or would I be like so many people in the world seem to do when given a taste of power, and use it to “improve” my own station in life?
I know that many of us would like to think we’d be heroes, but ask yourself: If you were suddenly given superman’s powers, how many of us would become superman? Would you REALLY selflessly run around throwing yourself in front of every speeding freight train, rescuing stupid people from stupider villains, and generally being all good all the time? I know that for me, the temptation to set myself up as god-king would be pretty serious. I mean, I’d have the power, and I could MAKE people stop being villains. We already have the idea of pre-emptive military actions, right? So is it really a large leap from that to setting yourself up as the petty dictator of Newcago? Sadly, I don’t think it’s as far as many of us would like to think.
Now, I am well aware that Mr. Sanderson probably didn’t set out with such thoughts in his mind when he wrote his novel. OTOH, that is what the novel is so good at doing, I think. On one level, yeah, it’s an action- adventure tale written for middle schoolers. Yet, like the best of spec-fic, it easily and seamlessly moves on to something much deeper, as I’ve just been discussing. So while it doesn’t ask the deep questions directly, the thought is there, and hopefully the kids (and adults!) reading it will stop to think for just a second.
Highly recommended.
Jeff Offringa's Journal 