A Wrinkle in Time

by on January 21, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

A Wrinkle in Time hits several time-honored traditions of the YA novel. Of course, it helped establish some of them. Meg is the outsider at school, she can’t help being a bit different, and can’t find the patience to do things the way others want. Children get to take a central role in saving the world (or at least a world). And there’s the convenient arrive right after you left bit from Narnia.

There is a lack of detail in many places. The description of a tesseract (a four-dimensional object) is confused; there’s a stopover on a two-dimensional world, which would put it out of our universe, but… well. Just how a tesseract can get one across the universe isn’t explained (there are some actual theories that relate to it, but nothing is given in the book), much less how any of this got out of pure mathematics. Going at all deeply into it would bog down the book to no end, but it does make the story feel like it has little foundation, especially as there’s no feeling that the author has it worked out in her head.

There are more serious problems. Meg does not feel like she has a lot of agency in parts of the book. Where she does act is important, but there’s a fair amount of dragging around.

However, the overall story and themes are very good, and carry all these weak points without trouble. Meg’s troubles are reflected in Camazotz where everyone is the same, and everything happens on a precise schedule. (Really, that part is extremely effectively creepy.)

So, yes… the book is worth a recommendation. At the same time, I feel that Diane Duane’s So You Want to Be a Wizard takes the same starting elements and delivers a much superior story, so I recommend it instead.

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The Frontiersmen

by on January 17, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Even in the realm of narrative history, this is fairly unique. The Frontiersmen reads much like a novel, but it is as historically sourced as possible (and contains a fair number of endnotes, though more for explaining context rather than giving sources). Because of the format, Eckert is at pains to describe how he put his book together in a foreword.

And it works. It did take some getting used to, as my history-reading and novel-reading instincts clashed for a bit. The book presents much of the immediate feel of life on the frontier, which is something inevitably lost in most historical works, but well-conveyed by fiction.

The book largely covers the settlement of Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana (~1770-1813), largely from the point of view of Simon Kenton. Kenton is one of the central figures of the American move across the Appalachians, though not as well known as contemporaries such as Daniel Boone (possibly because Boone came first, and naturally attracted much of the story telling of the time). As a partial balance, the book also traces Temcumseh’s entire life. Overall, both sides of what was happening in the area is presented, with attention paid to atrocities perpetrated by settlers and Indians. It still concentrates more on activities of the settlers, but that is where the records are, and it is not Eckert’s purpose to split hairs by finely examining archeology and oral traditions.

However, Eckert’s book does suffer from its formatting. Each chapter consists of a large number of subchapters, each of which is dated. Normally, this works out well, and is handy to place the chronology, but there’s plenty of sections that are just summaries of the previous few months, and towards the end there are entire years that are summarized with a ‘December 31’ entry.

I’d like to see more narrative history in general, and I think this format is good enough that it deserves to be used more than it has been. But while this is a good book, I can’t help but feel like it’s still a little too limited.

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On a Red Station Drifting

by on January 13, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This is yet another indication that I need to pay more attention to book review blogs. I picked this up because of an interesting post on one, and am very happy with the result. I doubt I would have come across it on my own (despite the excellent cover), and finding current recommendations has been one of my problems. Not that I don’t already have enough authors to try and catch up on.

On a Red Station Drifting has hidden depths. From the naming of characters, the culture and traditions are obviously based around Vietnamese culture. This is all you really need to know, and all that needs saying in the course of things, but the background is actually an alternate timeline (described on the author’s website) where China never turned completely inward, and derailed parts of Europe’s ascendancy, allowing for large-scale colonization from pre-communist Asian cultures.

It is also based around a 19th Century novel, borrowing themes and ideas, I assume, fairly well, though I’m sure the result doesn’t much resemble the original. At any rate, the story centers around the conflicts that happen away from conflict: The Dai Viet Empire is in the middle of troubled times, with rebellious warlords breaking off from central authority. While this is one of the more important parts of background, the war is not here, there’s no fighting or action during the course of the book. But the problems of the book stem from that fact; Prosper Station is overcrowded with refugees, many of the best people have gone away to war, probably never to come back, and one of the focus characters has arrived directly from the war zone.

A last note is that it is nice to see the growth of the moderate-length story again. From the 70s to the 90s, SF&F novels grew in average length, which is good for some stories, but not everything needs that much room. It seems like the ebook format is helping bring the novella to new prominence (the novella has always had trouble, as they cramp short-story collections, but make for an excessively-thin book by themselves).

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Speak Softly and Carry a Big Ship

by on January 9, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Patch made it over again for one final FtF game day of 2018 on the 29th. I had just gotten my own copy of Space Empires 4X, and we arranged to play that, which meant a lot of hurried counter clipping. I knew he had played it before, but a look at my logs showed that it had just been once in an early game. This was a surprise, and meant there was a lot more teaching to be done than I had supposed.

I had some surprises as well, as I’ve never really looked through the 2-player scenarios before. I went with the ‘normal’ 2-player map (I was thinking in terms of the ‘extra large’ map and didn’t realize those smaller arrangements existed; a separate ‘normal’ 2-player map could be an interesting addition to another expansion). And naturally, we stuck to the basic rules. …And we still had more than enough rules goofs along the way. A fair number were powered by my brief description of the rules and how things worked (Patch didn’t realize there was a difference between ship hull size, and hull size tech, for instance… different terms would have been nice). He bought Move 2 early in the expectation that it would speed up his mining ships… which it didn’t (and of course, the question didn’t come up until the third movement turn after he bought it…). It still affected the game, as I had to be careful that he didn’t slip around me and hit a vulnerable target on turn 3….

Colonization got off to a slow start for both of us, as it took a while to find even three inhabitable planets (our respective barren planets both showed up early). Patch got unlucky and lost a SC to his black hole, and I got lucky and survived when I found mine a couple turns later. I then started losing SCs to the deep-space markers, including the black hole I found first. But overall, luck went my way with three planets in the first line of deep space on my border, which I immediately colonized. Patch, ironically found both a Space Warp ‘1’ and ‘2’ on the same turn (okay, that was an optional rule we used; they’re so simple I don’t even think of it as such).


Situation when we broke for lunch; I’m blue, Patch is green.

Eventually, a second Space Warp 2 was found, which had a large effect on the game, as it led from near the middle on my right, to on Patch’s border on my left. I had been more economically successful (though a combination of knowing what I was doing and accidents of astrography), and the initial fighting happened out in the middle on my right. There was a number of things in the area, including several of my colonies, and a new one for Patch. My handful of CAs prevailed over his DDs (partly through luck, though luck for both of us was uniformly bad in early combats leading to a number of ships retreating away from revealed fleets). And I managed to get in and destroy a couple colonies (with more effort than it should have needed, thanks to more lousy die rolls).

And then… I had a string of disastrous combats, and most of my fleets were lost without doing anything, including a 3xDD group (high-tech, and of my bigger ship concentrations). Patch mostly stayed defensive, even as I panicked about what all those unseen flipped over ship counters could do. (Quite likely less than it looked, but it still intimidated me.) I managed to get a few ships put out there, with the aid of the forward shipyard I’d built up, and started building BCs because I was out of CA counters (all singletons, and most of them different).

That ended up breaking Patch. The counter offensive petered out, much as my initial offensive had. He was still generally using DDs, and they couldn’t keep up with the BCs. I burned him out of a couple more colonies, and Patch surrendered. It was getting late, and the difference in our economies was something he wasn’t going to overcome. He had gotten up to BCs, and had held a Tactics edge over me for most of the game (1 vs 0), but I’d just gotten up to Move 3 and BBs, and put one out on the last econ turn. Next time, I was going to finally get shipyard tech 2, so my size-4 forward yard could build two BBs a turn. I had a slight combat advantage (+2/+2 vs +2/+1), and would try to get to +3/+3 for the BBs when I could spare the money.


End game; we turned over four unexplored hexes near the camera to see what they were.

The real victory of course, is that Patch had a great time. The combination of grand sweep with fairly simple rules definitely appealed to him, and this game will go into the Vassal rotation.

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Penric’s Demon

by on January 5, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I’ve finally dug through enough of my ‘haven’t read yet’ pile to start on Bujold’s novella series set in the World of Five Gods. And I will certainly be getting to the rest of the series. This hit all the to-be-expected notes from her, and was very enjoyable.

I will say it felt a bit short. As a novella, it takes what could be the introductory period of an overweight novel and keeps it at that. Penric slams into trouble at the very start, and then things kind of just move along, while the nature of the trouble gets explored a bit. And then there’s some action, and a final bit to resolve just where Penric’s life will go, and end. In one of those overweight books, that last would effectively be the end of the beginning. Here it’s the end.

I will say that Penric’s Demon suffers a bit from a lack of agency on Penric’s part. He’s largely swept along on events for decent parts of the book. However, that’s certainly not to say he’s not doing anything, and Bujold’s wit and character exploration certainly keep the entertainment up in what some people might find slow going. Also, we get another glimpse into how gods and saints work in this world, and I’ve always really enjoyed Bujold’s take on the subject. When we get some action, it comes very suddenly, and is just as well done, and then the end gets dropped on the reader right after; it’s something of an abrupt transition in pace.

As a shorter work, it’s probably as good a place to try out Bujold’s writing as any, and cheaper than most. As ever with her books, it’s fully independent of everything else, and all the strengths of her writing are on display here. The downside is that you’ll probably want more, like I do.

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