Gulliver’s Fugitives

by on August 3, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Way back when, I read through several early ST:TNG novels (all put out during first season). It was a pretty sad bunch. One of them was notably better than the others (not to say that it was worth recommending), and it made sense when I looked at it afterwards and noted it was by Peter David.

Now I’ve come into possession of some slightly later ones; I think this was put out between seasons two and three (and officially it’d need to be set during season 3, as Dr. Crusher is mentioned, though she never gets ‘on camera’). And I can say things have gotten better for the novel line by this point.

Just. Barely.

There’s some good ideas here. The Enterprise ends up involved in a lost colony where all forms fiction are banned, and the repressive government is dedicated to ‘truth’, if not necessarily honesty. There’s a long-running underground rebellion dedicated to preserving literature and mythology. This part is handled fairly nicely, including a very multi-cultural set of story traditions.

However, there’s a couple of side plots that don’t work well at all. In fact the secondary plot gets going first, and looks like it will tie in directly to the main plot, but eventually turns out to be nothing but a red herring. This undermines a fair chunk of the structure of the novel, which is a real shame because at the same time it was also an early look at Troi and her abilities, and undermining that also hurts. The shift to red herring for the secondary plot could have been a nice subverting of expectations, but the payoff isn’t good enough to make it work. (I much prefer my initial expectation that the area happened to be where some form of extra-dimensional thought-beings resided, and Rampart’s efforts to quash fiction was started as an effort to keep from being unduly influenced by beings they can’t understand. Spoiler: Nope.)

And the world-building itself is lackluster. You never get to see what passes for normal life on this planet, never get a sense of what an ordinary person on this planet is like, how the overall culture works, and just why/how there’s apparently a constant bleed of people into the resistance. Also, this setup apparently got started by a bunch of Christian fundamentalists (the “truth” of the colony starts with an inerrant Bible), but there’s no hints as to how they got to be in charge, because the stories and myths that the resistance is preserving shows that the original colony ship had a very diverse population. Also, in the current day the planet has quite a bit of super-tech that lets them plot execption much of what a 24th Century starship can do.

So, it would take a lot of work, but we have a salvageable high concept here. One that could say some interesting things in the tradition of the best of Trek. But we get an underbaked plot, poor characterization (not something to attach a lot of blame to, as the main cast characters would still be developing in the time period the book would have been written, since there can be a notable lead time for that), and no more moral lesson than ‘fundamentalism is bad’ (it would have been fairly easy to point more at ‘stories are important’, and middle does this, but not so much the conclusion).

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The Years of Victory

by on July 26, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This second volume of Bryant’s series on the Napoleonic era was published in 1945 (commonly given as 1944, but he mentions “the events of 1939-1945” in his preface), and he has no qualms about drawing a parallel to Britain’s experience in WWII with its experience of the Napoleonic Wars. Unlike some who would bring up something like this several times over the course of the book, Bryant merely mentions it in his preface, and lets the history he writes stand on its own.

Having left off with the Peace of Amiens in The Years of Endurance, this volume starts with a look at England in 1802, and all the tourism to France that happened in the months of peace. This is an English-centric history, so while it does cover the various wars on the continent for a decade, it is largely concerned with what England was doing. The end of the book is naturally concerned with the Peninsular War, and ends with the fall of Ciudad Rodrigo.

Once again, this is well written, and the translation from print to electronic format in the Endeavour Press edition left it in pretty good shape. It’s a good book to read as part of a more rounded set of lighter books on the period, as it does leave out a lot with its English focus.

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The Tea Master and the Detective

by on July 18, 2022 at 12:00 pm
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This Aliette de Bodard story is every bit as good as the first one I read a while ago. In fact, I felt it was more tightly plotted, and shorter, than On a Red Station, Drifting, but it seems that book was only slightly longer than this.

At any rate, they share a setting, and at some point I will revisit it again, as the stories are well worth reading. I’d say this one could be slightly harder to get into than On a Red Station with no introduction, thanks to the viewpoint character being a ship’s intelligence stuck at a collection of habitats.

However, there is a nice melding of genres here, as a very SF setup quickly turns into a mystery with hard-boiled overtones. The Shadow’s Child is on the thin edge of bankruptcy when a new client walks through her door, and the assignment ends up generating new questions. The initial bit sets up the two characters well, but was a little difficult to get through for me. After that, the plot drives itself, and drags you along in the wake of two interesting characters.

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Nelson and the Nile

by on June 28, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

I picked up this book for cheap some time ago, and I’m quite happy to have finally gotten to it. This is definitely on the “layman’s” side of military history, but he does a very good job with it.

The background and aftermath make up fairly significant portions of the book, and serve the purpose well. Especially nice is the chapter where he goes into the construction and outfitting of HMS Vanguard (Nelson’s flagship at the Nile). This lets him talk about ship designs of the period, the “74”s (which the Vanguard was), and what went into outfitting a complete ship at the time. Its mostly things I’ve seen elsewhere, but it’s well-presented here, and a worthy diversion.

The central part of the book of course is about Nelson’s chase back-and-forth across the Mediterranean, reconstructing not only the lines across the map that the French and British fleets took, but the missed opportunities, the gaps in information that crippled Nelson’s initial attempts to find the French fleet before it got to Egypt.

One of Lavery’s main ideas is that the Battle of the Nile was the central hinge of the the wars of the period, and was more important than Trafalgar, which does have better heroic trappings. He makes a good case for this, but not an especially great case, and much of the extended aftermath portion where he tries to drive this idea home drags a bit. The immediate aftermath, with the victorious British fleet still greatly damaged and working its way back to friendly bases to spread the news is however, still very interesting, and a part you don’t get to see as often.

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Alliance Rising

by on June 20, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

C. J. Cherryh’s writing can get annoying with pages and pages of internal… well, monologue is not quite the right term, but it’s close. Major character’s thoughts are examined in detail as they go around on subjects weighing every angle. In general, very few people ever consciously think like this; it’s more an attempt to distill the conscious and unconscious factors that make a person act they way they do. It’s effective in its own way, but can be drawn out and heavy handed.

I had hoped that Fancher’s influence might tone this and a couple other elements down, but no. In fact, instead of this process being applied to one or two characters, we’re up to… three? four? here. And this means this is a more complex novel than most of Cherryh’s (and I’m not sure she’s ever written a simple one). Nonetheless, it was well worth the trip.

Downbelow Station, and a few other places, give the general outline of humanity’s expansion into the stars, first by slow-boat, and then FTL. Over time, Cherryh has been slowly exploring more of the backstory, and this book is set earlier than all the others. There’s a three-way tug of war of influence and trade, with Earth trapped behind the tyranny of distance: FTL drives won’t reach all the way from Sol to the nearest station established in STL era. Someday, Earth, with the resources of billions of people, will be set loose on the network of stations out there, but not yet….

In fact, closest stations to Earth are now something of a blind alley trade-wise. Only barely relevant, with the bigger stations further out there happy with that situation. But of course, it can’t last. Everyone knows it won’t last. No one knows when it will change.

The novel doesn’t end where I would have thought, but is well structured throughout. Better yet, as things get going from a slow-burn beginning, the story picks up a more human, personal side that I think much of Cherryh’s work lacks. This is a good intro to her long-standing Union-Alliance series, and easily one of the best of the set.

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