Stemalum scit.

I believe I have failed to mention on this blog my attendance at the upcoming Shore Leave convention in Baltimore. Probably because it took me forever to make up my mind as to whether or not I would be attending; I believe I finally made the call in late May, and even that I continued to waffle a bit. Can I afford it? Probably not, but I talked my buddy Dave into attending with me. Last year, Allyn told me I had "cronies", but this year I shall have to make do with just one.

Last year, I was on precisely one panel, concerning The Sky's the Limit, which made a good deal of sense. This year I am on four. Let us pray my voice does not go too squeaky. I have learned from teaching how to talk for an hour about random crap, but it generally involves having a book in front of me and being able to force people to do freewrites. Though maybe we should do that.

In any case, if you are at the convention and hard up for anything entertaining to do, I shall be found in the following locations:

• Friday, 10pm to whenever, Hunt/Valley Foyer: Meet the Pros with just about everybody ever. I will happily sign copies of The Sky's the Limit and, uh... well, The Sky's the Limit. Note to self: come up with "witty" thing to write above my autograph.
• Saturday, 11am to 12noon, Hunt Ballroom: The Young Gun Writers Ride the Range with Allyn Gibson, Amy Sisson, John Coffren, Kevin Lauderdale, Scott Pearson, James Johnson, and Aaron Rosenberg. Allyn says this is like the Strange New Worlds panels of old, but I never went to any of those. I guess I will talk about how to "break into" tie-in writing by barraging an editor with crappy outlines.
• Saturday, 5pm to 6pm, Salon A: Old School vs. New School: Changes in Tie-In Writing with William Leisner, Ann Crispin, Howard Weinstein, Peter David, Christopher Bennett, and Aaron Rosenberg. I've got no idea what this is about. I guess me, Bill, Christopher, and Aaron get to battle it out with Ann, Howie, and Peter? Maybe we get their careers if we win.
• Sunday, 10am to 11am, Salon B: Parallel/Alternate Timelines in Fiction with Geoff Trowbridge, Scott Pearson, and William Leisner. Given all four of us have been or will be in Myriad Universes anthologies, I guess that is what we will be talking about.  Do I have to confess that The Tears of Eridanus started life as a A Less Perfect Union rip-off to Bill?
• Sunday, 3pm to 4pm, Salon E: A Year Without the Doctor? with Allyn Gibson, Terri Osborne, John Drew, and Aaron Rosenberg.  Another Allyn Gibson brainchild, this will be discussing what we do to entertain ourselves while Doctor Who is off the air.  I might not actually show up, but I'm told the audience probably won't either.

See you all there!  Unless, of course, you're not going.  Or if you've decided you'd rather see a somewhat more interesting guest like Bob Picardo instead.  Or even the Twilight panel.

Steve

Sunday morning, I got up somewhat early to take Adam to the airport and Hayley to the train station-- fortunately I'd got out of taking James to the airport at 5am. I waited with Hayley for her train, and then I hit the road! The path from South Bend to Vernon skirts Cleveland, where I suppose I have some future in-laws, but more importantly it's where my cousin Joey goes to school. I hadn't seen him because of that during my visit to Cincinnati in early June, so I arranged to meet him (and his girlfriend Roshni) for lunch. We went to an Italian bakery in Little Italy, where I had a delicious meatball sub (not a grinder, as New Englanders would have you believe) and some also delicious chocolate cannoli. It was nice to see Joey (though I think I'm supposed to call him "Joe" now that he's 21), and his girlfriend seems nice.

Google Maps had told me that from Cleveland to Vernon, it was better to take I-90 E across New York, and when planning my journey, I realized that that took me right through Erie, PA, where my cousins the Grohs live! I've actually never been to their place, and coming a little short of the halfway point of my journey home, it seemed like a good place to stop for the night. So another two hours, and I was with my cousins, who (like Joey) I'd not seen since Christmas. They took good care of me, giving me a bed to sleep in and feeding me (quite well). It turned out to be a good thing I had decided to stop; while reading a book when my aunt and uncle were out (English country dance practice), I feel asleep on the couch. Good thing I wasn't behind the wheel at that point!

After dinner, we walked out to the lakeside; they live just a mile or so from Lake Erie, and you can hike through the woods to get there. We got ice cream at a 1950s diner, and then watched the sun set over the lake, which has never looked prettier. Good times.

Then Monday morning, I was off again-- an eight-hour trip from Pennsylvania up into New York, across that whole state, into Massachusetts, and then down into Connecticut from above. Quicker than going back down to mid-Pennsylvania and taking I-80 E, perhaps, but way more expensive, since I-90 is a toll road for almost its entire length in New York. Also, upstate New York is nowhere near as pretty to look at as mid-Pennsylvania! What a long, boring drive. I thought I was home clear once I was in Massachusetts, but that turned out to be longer than I'd thought-- and on the Massachusetts Turnpike (or the "MassPike" as the locals call it), another bloody toll road! When I got off, though, I didn't have to pay anything, which I attributed to my good looks, but I was later informed that they don't make you pay the toll if you just drive in western Massachusetts (a.k.a., the boring bit). I hate sequentially numbered exits: you see that you have to get off at exit 4 and think, "Well, that can be far then" only to find out that over 40 miles separate them! In the Midwest, we'd call them exit 3 and exit 45, not 1 and 4!

At 4pm, I rolled into the parking lot of Willowbrook Apartments, nice and on schedule, a trip well made. Good thing, too, 'cause I had work the next day!

Steve

After the wedding, of course, was the reception, which was a blast. It got off to an auspicious start-- James, Adam, and I overshot the road we needed to turn on, but a friendly South Bend native set us straight. Then, we were told that the DJ would announce the bridal party in the order we'd processed at church, which turned out not to be the case, so we had to be quick and process in when we were called. And he forgot to announce the best man/matron of honor altogether, so they ended up coming in after the bridge and groom!

After that, though, it was all good. The food was decent, but the drinks were exceptional! Chris's father paid for the biggest alcohol package they had, which meant anything we wanted was free, and I more than took advantage of that. The only problem we ran into was when we groomsmen tried to do a shot together; not even Mr. Tracy's "I paid for this!" could secure us what we wanted. So we all got small glasses of bourbon, went off on our own, and totally did not drink them like shots. The cake itself was so-so, but the icing was delish! James and I celebrated our union by stealing Chris and Sharon's places at the main table.

After the traditional opening dances, there was a "snowball" dance where the bridal party started it off, and then had to pull in people from the crowd for new partners. And then again, so it built up. I grabbed Hayley my first time, but my second time, the girl I approached turned me down! Burn! Later on, Adam congratulated her on her keen insight. I had a fairly good time overall, even if I still do not know how to dance, but I expect that will never change.

Afterwards, me and Hayley and James and Adam (now joined by Dave Poon) hit up the store once more to get Dave a swimsuit as well as some rum and coke. We then went to the hot tub, where we drank our rum and coke and ordered in a pizza-- delivered straight there! If that's not decadence, I don't know what is. We offered to share, but everyone else in the hot tub ran off. Though Chris's father took a cup when he passed through the room. We spent some time just talking and whatever: an enjoyable end to a fantastic evening, even if Hayley and Adam did start singing Christian camp songs when they were drunk.

Steve

Getting there! Saturday (nearly two weeks ago now, geeze) was the actual day of the wedding itself! As you might imagine, we had a fairly low-key morning, mostly spent making sure everyone was on the same page. (Were we getting dressed at the hotel or the chapel? Were we folding our fancy handkerchiefs? Was Chris making a run for it?) A few of us got lunch at Wendy's, and then... it was time!

We dressed and made our way to St. Mary's easily enough. On Friday, we'd been told that the men's dressing room would have a blue curtain on the door. On arriving in the hall, we located a couple rooms with a long blue curtain in front of them. Josh, the best man, ascertained that the women were getting ready in one of the rooms, so Chris headed on into the other one...

Only to learn that it connected to the lady's room, and there was his bride in her wedding dress! She screamed, we panicked, Chris was bundled out of there, and it was quickly determined that the men's dressing room had a blue curtain in the window of its door. Totally not confusing at all. Word on the street was that Sharon was upset, but fortunately, Josh was blamed and all the hatred directed at him. I guess that's what the best man is for!

Mostly we just stood around a lot in the dressing room. Chris demanded some liquid courage, and so a bottle of rum was secured, from which we all took a swig. Eventually... it was time!

A wedding is a wedding, and a Catholic wedding is a Catholic wedding. No real surprises there. Apparently Sharon's garter fell off her leg as she processed down the aisle, but Hayley was on top of things and managed to recover it. The priest got confused and skipped over a couple things near the end-- the Notre Dame alma mater, the bride and groom's blessing before the Virgin, and getting the wedding party back up on the altar before the exit profession-- but we rolled with the punches and no one noticed.

And then there was Mr. and Mrs. Tracy! It's weird. I've known Christopher for almost exactly ten years now. We met our freshman year of high school, as I wandered around cafeteria during the Freshman Picnic during the first month of school and heard two students discussing Star Trek. Chris likes to claim I came up to them and squeaked, "Are you guys talking about Star Trek?" (he does a nice Steve Mollmann Squeal), but I don't think I was even that bold. I'm pretty sure I just loitered there listening until they noticed me and invited me to join in on the conversation. The other guy is long gone, but I've been friends with Christopher ever since-- four years together in high school. He was my editor-in-chief in yearbook, I was his Lord Chancellor in Science Fiction Club. Though it has to be admitted that the Science Fiction Club, like so many things, was his idea-- I just sat there saying it would never work. Nine years later, and last I heard the club was still going strong! And he didn't just initiate hare-brained schemes; when my home-brew Doctor Who audio dramas were invented, he threw himself in whole-heartedly. (Of course, that may have just been because he wanted to be the Doctor and thus at the center of attention!) Foundation, Ad Astra Per Aspera, all that crazy stuff I did at St. X, he was at the center of. And as he's fond of pointing out, he introduced me to Doctor Who, and goodness knows how I would have ended up without that! (I, on the other hand, made him aware of the existence of Firefly.) My interactions with Chris have sometimes been a little weird-- not in a bad way, but if you drew a circle of me, James, Chris, and Adam, Chris and I would be on opposite ends and when we end up one-on-one it can still be a little awkward. But four years of different colleges and two years beyond that haven't changed the fact that he's one of my absolute best friends, a great, enthusiastic, friendly, brave guy I couldn't imagine not knowing. When every other friend I had left the Cincinnati area after graduating college, there was me and him hanging in there, doing our best to help each other through a rough time-- his girlfriend in South Bend, mine in Luxembourg! He's taken risks I can't imagine taking, and if I had to follow anyone into the marriage plunge, I'm glad it's him. He and Sharon will make each other very happy, even if she does make him move to Colorado. My best of wishes to him and Sharon. Even if he does give crap dating advice.

Steve

The past two weeks have seen a bevy of reviews from me appearing on Unreality SF, as I sped my way through the remainder of the third season of Doctor Who: The New Eighth Doctor Adventures. Though I'd found the first four installments of the season rather shaky, things certainly picked up after the halfway point with The Scapegoat and The Cannibalists... and then I was promptly let down again by the two-part finale. Ah, well. Maybe I'm just becoming old and cranky and Paul McGanned out-- I've been following his adventures in the audio medium for eight years now after all. Most of the other reviews I've read are far more positive than mine. But I really do think Big Finish's output in this regard has been lackluster as of late, a feeling intesified by the over-reliance on old continuity.  (In nine sequential adventures, the Doctor and Lucie have faced villians from five different stories broadcast between 1974 and 1976!  Not only old continuity, but the same continuity.) The first season of the NEDAs was fairly good, but I've found each subsequent season to be worse than the one before it. The eighth Doctor doesn't sparkle here-- whether that's because Paul McGann is bored or because the writing's just not there, I don't know. Sometimes he's fabulous, but mostly he's pretty eh, as much as it pains me to say it. Sheridan Smith is always fantastic as Lucie Miller, however. I really hope the inevitable fourth season sees a return to the early heights of the eighth Doctor range, or even its middle above-averages.

• #3.5: The Scapegoat by Pat Mills (Dead London, The Iron Legion), with guest star Samantha Bond (Mrs. Wormwood in The Sarah Jane Adventures)
• #3.6: The Cannibalists by Jonathan Morris (Flip-Flop, Festival of Death), with guest star Phil Davis (Lucius Petrus Dextrus in "The Fires of Pompeii")
• #3.7: The Eight Truths and #3.8: Worldwide Web by Eddie Robson (Memory Lane, Human Resources, The Condemned), featuring Katarina Olsson as the Headhunter and Kelly Godliman as Karen Coltrane, with guest star Stephen Moore (Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy), showcasing the Eight Legs from 1974's Planet of the Spiders

I think these will be my last reviews for a little bit, unless something unexpected comes out, since I'm a little reviewed out at the moment.  I'll just be back to my regular duties on The Companion Chronicles, and the next one is Brendan's, thankfully.

Steve

Man, I'd better pick up the pace on this series of reminiscences. Continuing the Notre Dame action from where I left off:

Hayley, James, Adam, and I were up bright and early Friday morning. Or at least Adam and James were, and I dragged myself up at a reasonable hour and had a nice waffle. (Authentically Belgian? Seems doubtful.) As such, we were all hanging out in the lobby of the hotel when Mr. Tracy asked if we wanted to pick up our tuxedos. The rest of the groomal party just having emerged from hibernation (rousing Chris was one of the Labors of Hercules), we agreed to head off with him. Hayley tagged along for a lack of anything better to do. The pickup went fairly smoothly-- I think my shirt was overlarge, but you couldn't tell that when it was buried underneath the rest of the tuxedo. Then I paid the extortionate prices (one of the most expensive pieces of clothing I've ever had... and I don't even get to keep it!). Chris and the other two groomsmen arrived just as we left.

A few people (mostly Chris's immediate family) were gathering for mass at Notre Dame's basilica, so we tagged along to that. This was actually my first time on Notre Dame's campus, and it's certainly nice-- or at least the area around the basilica is! The basilica itself was also very nice looking. I do appreciate a good church. Incidentally, this was the third of four masses I attended that week-- probably more than in the entire preceding year!

Everyone involved (and there were a lot of people at this point) had lunch at a Chinese restaurant (I had some decent Kung Pao) after that, and then Hayley, James, Adam, and I continued our self-ostracism by running some errands in downtown South Bend; Adam needed to go to the post office and the bank. I had to drive, of course, and I must say that South Bend's downtown is an indecipherable navigational maze. Still, after at least three complete circuits, we ended up everywhere we needed to be.

Then it was time for the rehearsal! The marriage was held at St. Mary's, the girl's college affiliated with Notre Dame that Sharon attended, specifically in the chapel of Sharon's old dorm. This was pretty nice, too, even if the crucifix on the altar was crooked. We were briefed on where we had to be and when, and it all seemed pretty simple and manageable, even for us. This is where the out-and-out weirdness of the whole event started to weigh on me-- Christopher Tracy was getting married! Really!?

After that was the rehearsal dinner, at Notre Dame's on-campus nice restaurant. I had some delicious shrimp, and our corner of the table (Hayley, James, Adam, and I-- notice a pattern) had several different pitchers of beer at the Tracys' expense. Man, other people getting married is awesome.

That evening we went to Target to get swimtrunks for Adam-- James had had the idea of bringing them since we were going to be in a hotel, and he's suggested it to me when I packed, and I passed it along to Hayley. Then we hit the hotel pool and hot tub, where Chris joined us. He spent much of the event at the beck and call of mysterious forces, of course, so this was probably the only time we got to spend a sustained period of time hanging out. Which was nice.

Steve

Google Maps indicated that it would take James and I thirteen hours to make the journey from Vernon, Connecticut, to South Bend, Indiana. Most of this journey would take place on one highway: we'd start off on I-84 W until Scranton, where we'd catch I-81 S briefly into Wilkes-Barre, and then for the next 575 miles we'd be on I-80 W, through most of Pennsylvania, all of Ohio, and half of Indiana.

Chris's bachelor party was supposed to start at 6pm, and I wanted a slight margin of error, so we hit the road at 4:05am on Thursday the 18th, having had a good three hours' sleep. (James not being tired at all after his sleepless twenty-four hours.) In western Connecticut, it started to rain. There are few things I hate more than driving unfamiliar roads in the dark and the rain; I have a really hard time seeing the lines on the roads in such conditions. Fortunately, on a highway that's not much of a consideration; it only became on issue on a very confusing road nexus where we pulled off to get gas.

The journey was relatively uneventful; I pulled the first eight hours or so, until we got into Ohio, when James took over. I-80 is a toll road in Ohio, which meant we were extorted. Western Ohio is finally when we escape the cloud we'd been under the entire time and finally entered into some sunlight. It hadn't rained continuously since Connecticut, but it had been pretty dang close, and it had never not been overcast. After paying the extortionate tolls at the Ohio border, we crossed into Indiana, where we were subject to them all over again. Geeze.

We made it into South Bend at 4:15pm, making it a nice twelve-hour-and-ten-minute journey. Only two stops, both for gas (and bathroom). Shazam! Another Steve Mollmann Road Trip Spectacular. Chris and his family had arrived recently, so we tooled around the hotel with them for a little bit until we headed out for the bachelor party.

Chris's best man, Josh, had reserved a suite at the stadium of South Bend's minor league baseball team, the Silverhawks. The Silverhawks themselves were pretty pathetic: our waitress informed us that they'd lost fourteen of their last fifteen games, and that night ended up turning it into fifteen out of sixteen. At one point their first baseman dropped a catch, bent down to pick it up, and then dropped it again. By the time he had it, guess what: the runner had reached first. At another point, three players attempted to catch the same ball, and once one of them did get hold of it, there was no one to throw it to, as the baseman was one of those three. Bravo.

But it was fun otherwise. (And we had a good time cheering for the team regardless.) There was a lot of food: customary sides like baked beans, pasta salad, and potato salad, as well as a main course of hamburgers and hot dogs with all the trimmings. Not to mention a keg of beer. I ate a fair amount and drank a bit, too. Actually, strike "fair amount"; I ate way too much. But it was cool to hang out with James, Stephen Poon (who'd made the trip over from Chicago), and others-- including Christopher, of course. (I also got a free Silverhawks baseball cap, which came in handy as my catering job occasionally requires us to wear ballcaps but doesn't provide them.) Afterward, we headed to a local "Irish" pub, but I didn't get anything there because my stomach didn't feel so great now.

Hayley had been supposed to get into South Bend on a train around 9:30pm, and Chris's fiancée Sharon was going to pick her up, but she'd called me during the baseball game to tell me that she'd managed to miss her connecting train out of Chicago and that she wouldn't get in until 11:30pm. This was actually okay; the South Bend train station is in the airport, and Sharon was going to be picking Adam up from the airport at that time anyway.

But she called me from the train station to inform me that she was nowhere near the airport. I reported this to Christopher. "What's she doing at the other airport?" he asked, sounding boggled that anyone could even ever consider going to the Amtrak station. Eventually we figure out where she was. "Can she take a cab?" That seemed sort of pointless if I could just get her-- but my car was back at the hotel. Two of Chris's friends were heading out then anyway, so they took me to the train station (the right one) and thence to the hotel.

I then I was with my fiancée for the first time in three months.

Steve

James flew in the afternoon of Sunday the 14th (also my kid brother's birthday... we had a three-minute phone conversation). Though I talk to James semi-frequently, this was the first time I'd seen him since December, and my seeing of him had been pretty comparable the year before that. A bit of a drastic reduction for a person I saw every day for four years of high school and lived with for four years of college. He and his fellow novitiates had gotten the whole week off, which was good timing seeing as Chris's wedding was that coming Saturday, and he decided to spend the non-wedding time hanging out with me in Connecticut. His folly? Perhaps.

His first day here was pretty low key; we hung out for a bit and went for a walk on the Rails-to-Trails system that runs throughout Vernon. We went further than I'd ever gone before. It's a nice trail system, running through a lot of Vernon backwoods and backyards; I really must reassemble my bike and make some use of it this summer.

On our walk we scoped out the Sacred Heart Catholic Church here in Vernon, as James was considering hitting up daily mass there. I can't find any pictures of this place on the Internet, which I'm sure is deliberate; it's one of the ugliest buildings I've ever seen in my life. It also seems to be deserted: the doors are locked up, weeds overrun the sides and sidewalk, the bulletin board we could seen through the window was years out of date. We could just barely make out some graffiti spray-painted inside, near the altar, about killing Jesus. Someone seems to not know the difference between Catholics and Jews. I don't know what the story is; it looks like mass is held in the parish center these days, and the parish shares a priest with one in Bolton. Strange. Deserted structures weird me out sometimes.

Uncertain about our church, we ended up going to a Polish Catholic parish in Rockville early Monday morning. Afterward, we hit up the Henry Park to see Vernon's one landmark, the Fox Hill Tower. Distressingly, it was closed! Of course, no one can stop you from looking at a tower, but it is nice to go up it. James had packed two baseball gloves, of course, and we played catch for a couple hours in the park. He only brained me once.

That evening, I had orchestrated a social event to celebrate James's visit. I don't do this sort of thing very often, and given James's appreciation of Indian food, I held it at Utsav's, an Indian restaurant within walking distance of my apartment that I'd never visited. About ten people ended up showing: Jared and Angela, Andrew and Allison, Christina, Christiana, and Danielle, Shawna, and Lori. Apparently I do have friends. We then returned to my apartment where despite the purchase of some small amount of alcohol, very little was drunk, and Catchphrase was played, something James complained about the entire time. I tried to push the energies of the group elsewhere, but it was resistant. Everyone keeps on telling me they had a good time, which I find hard to believe, unless they were simply referring to the delicious delicious food.

On Tuesday, I drove James into Hartford at 6am so he could catch a train into New York City-- he deserted me for a day! Actually, this was sort of useful; I caught up on my FE Orientation work and some other stuff. I picked him up at 6am the next morning, he having slept for just a short time on the bus. He insisted that he would forgo sleeping, but I let him fall asleep on my couch, which he obviously needed. That afternoon, we hit up UConn, so I gave him the grand tour: the library and, uh... the library. I don't go many places on campus. Apparently. I then deserted him (payback!) so that I could go to a meeting of the unnamed creative writing group I just joined, where a piece I'd written was thrown under a bus. Literally.

That evening we watched The Five Doctors, which I think was James's attempt to simply pick up where we'd left off all those years ago, but I'm not about to let myself get hurt that way again.

Steve

I promise I'll have a blog entry or five up explaining what I've been up to the past week-plus soon enough; until then, you ought to enjoy one of my latest reviews at Unreality SF.  I'm back to my regular duties reviewing The Companion Chronicles, and this time it is Doctor Who: The Companion Chronicles #3.12: The Stealers from Saiph, written by Nigel Robinson (The New Doctor Who Adventures: Birthright) and starring Mary Tamm as the first Romana. 

Brendan Moody seems to be getting all the good ones to review; #3.11 was the return of Jago and Litefoot of The Talons of Weng-Chiang fame, and #4.1 will be the return of Sara Kingdom of The Daleks' Master Plan fame.  Not that I don't like Romana (indeed, I like her a lot, though I prefer the Lalla Ward incarnation), but... Christopher Benjamin! Trevor Baxter! Jean Marsh!  It's not fair.

Steve

Green Arrow: Sounds of Violence
Writer: Kevin Smith
Penciller: Phil Hestler
Inker: Ande Parks
Colorist: James Sinclair
Letter: Sean Konot

DC Universe Timeline: 4 Years Ago
Real World Timeline: 2001?

(The stories in this book pick up shortly after Quiver. Green Arrow is still reestablishing himself as a force on the streets of Star City, and still coming to terms with his relationships with Black Canary, Mia Dearden, and his son.)

Sounds of Violence collects the second part of Kevin Smith's run on Green Arrow, issues #11-15. Despite containing only about half as many issues as the previous volume, it still packs a satisfying punch. It consists of what are really three separate stories, but all three concern one thing: Oliver Queen's relationship to the people around him. If you read my review of the first volume of this series, you'll know that what I liked was Oliver's depiction as a great hero but a not-so-great man who tries his best. This volume continues that trend.

( Seriously, the Arrowmobile? The Arrowcave? )

Sounds of Violence does exactly what I'd hoped the Green Arrow series would do after Quiver: move away from the continuity-heavy background and simply tell good stories about Green Arrow and surrounding characters with the set-up Smith had established.  I feel like I don't have a lot to say about this book, but that's because it doesn't have anything big to say about humanity, the universe, or even Green Arrow himself.  It sets itself modest goals of telling a cracking good superhero story with strong characterization and snappy dialogue and exceeds those goals well.  Though this is the last Green Arrow comic James owns and thus the last you'll see featured in Faster than a DC Bullet, I'm interested enough in the series that I'll be continuing onwards with it, into the trade paperbacks that followed Smith's run on the title.

Steve


Next up: Superman Batman: Public Enemies

I have a rocking summer job.

Oh yes I do.

Since I'm not doing anything of the things I'm supposed to be doing (reading for my exams, revising a paper for publication, working on tasks for FE TA Orientation, getting some writing done), I figured I might as well seek gainful employment.  The gainful employment was sought in many areas but only received in one; I'm working for UConn's catering department.  I filled the "relevant experience" box with a five-paragraph essay about my many Dining Services abilities, which has had the end result of my working for an undergraduate.  I am pretty sure I had learned how to use a dish machine when he was in grade school, but the hours are few but flexible and the pay exists, so who am I to complain?

Actually, it's not that bad.  I do like a bit of hard labor now again, and last Friday I was one of four students responsible for shifting and positioning over 600 chairs.  And guess who was called on to wheel the stacks of 13 chairs most often?  Well, I exaggerate, but not by much.  It was just three hours, but it was an intense three hours.  On the other hand, Thursday I worked a buffet line when I mostly stood and watched parents make sandwiches. (My favorite was the one with the one slice of turkey on her sandwich and literally nothing else.) At one point I had to replenish a box of chips.  Almost certainly the most bored I have been in ages, and of course the longest of the shifts I worked last week (a whopping 4.5 hours).

And there's perks.  One is an infinite supply of delicious free food: macaroni and cheese with ham, pigs in a blanket, little mushroom pocket things, lasagna, teriyaki chicken, and of course, ice cream from UConn's famous Dairy Bar.  No complaints there.

The other perk I remembered when my mother asked me if I had come up with any stories, and I suddenly realized that I had; while pushing chairs around last week, I sketched out an entire story about space pirates.  We'll see if it ever gets written, but I copied down an outline, so there's that.

This week I'm not working because James is here visiting, but that's probably worth a blog all of its own, so you'll have to just stay tuned.

Steve

In addition to my usual duties at Unreality SF of reviewing alternating installments of The Companion Chronicles, I've extended my grasp in a desperate attempt to out-do Brendan Moody by taking over the reviews of The New Eighth Doctor Adventures. My first review in this line is of Doctor Who: The New Eighth Doctor Adventures #3.4: Wirrn Dawn, written by Nicholas Briggs and starring Paul McGann and Sheridan Smith, with special guest stars Daniel Anthony (Clyde in The Sarah Jane Adventures) and Colin Salmon (Doctor Moon in "Silence in the Library").

The story features the return of the insectoid Wirrn, the villains of 1975's The Ark in Space, the names of which I can never remember how to pronounce (I've only seen their original appearance twice at most, despite owning it). I always want to say that it's "Wern" when it's actually "WEER-un".

Steve

School's out! And as soon as I turned in my grades, I officially embarked on the Spring 2009 Tie-In Catch-Up Reading Project. I'd fallen woefully behind on my Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Star Wars novels during the semester; I had books I'd purchased in January I hadn't gotten around to yet. So with some few exceptions, most of my books for the month were tie-ins so that I might once again be able to participate in discussion on the TrekBBS, Outpost Gallifrey, and TheForce.Net. The nice thing about tie-ins is that many of them are short, quick reads (especially comics) and as a result, in the month of May 2009, I read nineteen books, and this is what they were:

War of the Worlds: The Resurrection
by J. M. Dillard
The last of the The War of the Worlds books I purchased during my initial research phase, this is a novelization of the pilot episode of the 1980s syndicated television series that was a sequel to the 1953 film. I've never seen the show, and from reading this book, I'm not terribly encouraged to do so. At least on the page, the characters have the charisma and interest of planks of wood. There's a male scientist undergoing an unconvincing dissolving relationship (it's not unconvincing that the relationship is dissolving; it's unconvincing that it ever existed in the first place, given his fiancée's characterization as a one-dimensional harridan), a female scientist with a daughter and an unconvincing sexual tension with the male scientist, and a Native American Army colonel who spends his time dispensing earthly wisdom and stories (though this is amusingly undercut in one scene where he privately reveals that he's just bullshitting someone, but this is the exception). Then there's all the scenes written from the point-of-view of the aliens (no longer Martians, but that's okay since there was never any clear reason why the protagonists of the 1953 film thought they were Martians anyway) which just go on and on and on with tedious extraterrestrial politics and power plays. The only worthwhile character is Doctor Clayton Forrester, and that's probably just because of my nostalgia for the 1953 movie, not anything this book actually does.

It also suffers from the fact that it's a novelization of a pilot; the whole book is just set up for a series of stories in a completely different medium, rendering the whole thing pretty pointless as an independent reading exercise. It follows the pilot formula to a t-- the characters learn of a threat, try to fight back with limited success (though in this book's case that amounts to about seventeen tedious car trips between California and New Mexico), organize and get introduced to the recurring characters, and then strike back with a definitive victory that's ultimately irrelevant because we have to get a few more seasons out of this concept. (Think of both Stargate pilots, actually.) Yawn. The format shift also makes this book suffer because you can't gloss over unwieldy things in a book the way you can in a TV show, such as the fact that somehow the invasion of the entire Earth by an alien force in 1953 has had no impact on society or history. Everyone acts like the woman scientist (sorry, I can't be bothered to look up her name) should be all gung-ho about fighting the aliens because her second cousin or something was killed by them... but surely almost everyone on the planet would have lost someone close to them in the attack? So much for the "great disillusionment". On the other hand, the prose format means there's some nice flashbacks to the 1953 invasion, but once again that's more success because of nostalgia than anything this book is actually doing. I was surprised at how poor this effort was; J. M. Dillard has certainly taken some pretty crap source scripts and turned them into decent novels before, so I don't know what her problem was here. A really crap source script, maybe? I don't know that I'll ever brave the War of the Worlds TV show to find out after reading this.

Green Arrow: Quiver
by Kevin Smith
Faster than a DC Bullet is getting back underway for the summer and hopefully thereafter; you can read my analysis of the resurrection of the Emerald Archer (which I enjoyed) here.

Doctor Who #30: The Eyeless
by Lance Parkin
Lance Parkin is my third-favorite Doctor Who writer, so this was a welcome return to Doctor Who novels, his first since 2005's The Gallifrey Chronicles. It features the Doctor traveling alone following the events of "Journey's End", without a companion, and thus much of it is told from his point-of-view, a move I sometimes find a bit odd in Doctor Who books, and this one is no exception; a couple moments just didn't ring true for me. That niggle aside, Lance's usual gift for characterization is in evidence, though the especial strength of this book is setting; the depiction of the Fortress and the surrounding city of Acropolis are excellent. And the Eyeless are a pretty good alien species, creepy like the best Doctor Who aliens. A good showing from Parkin, and hopefully not the last.

Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force
by Michael Reaves
I was somewhat underwhelmed by the first two Coruscant Nights novels, which I felt had not really delivered on the Jedi detective/Coruscant noir premise they had been billed under, so I didn't expect much out of this, the final installment of the trilogy. To my surprise, it turned out to be the best of the series-- perhaps because it abandons all pretense of that premise. This novel introduces a couple wildcards into the cozy world of Jax Pavan and his band of Resistance fighters: a plot to assassinate Emperor Palpatine and a powerful young Force adept who has the power to fight back... or expose their little group. Both wildcards are a little farfetched-- the characters seem very optimistic about their chances of reaching Palpatine, and I didn't buy that the kid could have somehow gone unnoticed until now-- but worth it for the conflict they introduce. Most of the novel is taken up by the various characters Reaves had so well constructed over the first two books reacting, often in unexpected yet plausible ways, to these developments. They really are shaken up and changed by what transpires. The conclusion was a bit off, particularly the fight with Darth Vader, who was not as imposing as he should have been, especially considering how well Reaves had depicted him in the previous book, but that doesn't stop this from being a solidly above-average conclusion to a previously average storyline.

a Leap
by Anna Enquist
This collection of dramatic monologues was covered in full in a reading roundup spotlight; mostly I enjoyed them, some more than others.

Animal Fairy Tales
by L. Frank Baum
My research for my seminar paper on The Master Key led me to pick up some Baum books I never encountered when I was a humble Oz-obsessed youth, and this was one of them. Animal Fairy Tales is a collection of fairy tales with animals for protagonists, as you might guess. Some of them are fun, but most of them moralize to some extent, which is disappointing, as Baum is never at his best when adopting a moral tone. They're curiously un-American in some ways, as most of them feature dynastic animal monarchies, but then Baum was always pretty inconsistent about the merits of monarchy vs. democracy in his fantasy. Despite the moralizing, I enjoyed "The Discontented Gopher", which is about a gopher who takes riches over contentment and suffers for it, but my favorite was probably "The Forest Oracle", as it is a classic Baumian con-man-makes-good story. "The Pea-Green Poodle" was also enjoyable-- mostly for the image the title conjures-- and I also like the mythical feel of "The Enchanted Buffalo". A decent set of stories, but Baum has certainly done better work.

Star Wars: Vector, Volume One
by John Jackson Miller and Mick Harrison
Throughout 2008, the Vector crossover dominated Dark Horse's Star Wars comics; it was an epic storyline that wove through all four ongoings. Finally, the first half of that series has come to trade paperback, giving us a book that is, totally unconfusingly, volume one of Vector, volume five of Knights of the Old Republic, and volume three of Dark Times. The KotOR section, like volume four before it, keeps the series focused on its strength: fun action/adventure with a touch of Dark Goings-On. I can't dislike any story that sees Zayne Carrick, bumbling padawan, and Marn "The Gryph" Heirogryph, criminal mastermind, in action together. Miller turns in yet another thrilling installment, proving that KotOR is the best ongoing Star Wars story being produced today. Scott Hepburn's art, on the other hand, was just a little bit too cartoony to work all the time; the gigantic jaws every character seemed to have were annoying. The Dark Times segment was somewhat less successful; the Uhumele crew felt like guest stars in their own story, standing by and watching as the events of the Vector saga played out before them, not actually playing a role in shaping them. And seriously, can we have a volume of Dark Times without a character death? Yes, I understand it is the "dark times", not the "happy fun times" but the emotional shock wears thin when it comes constantly. Bomo Greenbark is still awesome, even when he is just standing around. And, of course, who can dislike Doug Wheatley's art?

Star Trek: Mirror Images
by Scott & David Tipton
I'm a bit mirror-universed out, to be honest, so I wouldn't have picked this up if it hadn't been by IDW's usual stalwart team of the Tiptons on story and David Messina on art. The art was as good as usual, but the story wasn't particularly interesting: it's difficult to create a good story about Kirk taking over the I.S.S. Enterprise, as he does it through a magic box that can disintegrate anyone anywhere. Obviously he's going to win, but the Tiptons have the unenviable task of trying to stretch this one-issue plot out to four issues. Why doesn't he just disintegrate everyone right away? Who knows? (There's also a random interlude about Picard on the I.S.S. Stargazer wedged halfway through the book for no apparent reason, equally pointless as the main story.)

Star Wars: Legacy, Volume Five: The Hidden Temple
by John Ostrander and Jan Duursema
Three comic books in a row-- no wonder I got so many books read this month! I didn't find this installment of the usually-excellent Legacy series very interesting; it's definitely the weakest thus far. Is it because of too much of the dull Cade Skywalker? Or the Jedi yet again being afraid to act for no readily apparent reason in a crisis situation where their choice of action is obvious? Or the appearance of another Jedi from Ostrander's prequel comics who apparently somehow sat out the entirety of the original trilogy, the Bantam novels, The New Jedi Order, Dark Nest, and Legacy of the Force yet is now a revered member of the Order? I don't know, but I was just not very interested in this book.

The Twinkle Tales
by L. Frank Baum
The stories of this book blend Baum's animal fairy tales with his usual form of fantasy (sending an earth character into the fairy world), by sending a Dakotan farm girl called Twinkle, and sometimes her friend Chubbins, into animal worlds, like those of prairie dogs and woodchucks. Some of the stories are most successful than others: in some, Twinkle merely wanders around a bit and learns to see things from an animal's perspective; in others, there's actually a plot of sorts. I'd expect to find the latter better than the former, but the Twinkle tale that's the most plot-driven ("Prince Mud-Turtle", about a fairy prince enchanted into the form of a mud-turtle) is the least interesting. Far better are the stories where we see our human world from an outside perspective, either through animals commenting on it, as in "Mr. Woodchuck", or through animals reenacting our human rituals and problems, as in "Bandit Jim Crow". The latter was my favorite story in the book (perhaps not coincidentally, Twinkle's role in this one is brief and incidental), a shocking violent rumination on the perils of law and justice. It's no wonder that Baum wrote a followup, "Policeman Bluejay", which is nearly as long as the other six stories in the book put together. It's good too, though I prefer the first story. (It has its high points, though, such as Twinkle and Chubbins's transformation into birds with human heads, and the creepy utopia that is the bird land of Paradise.) "Twinkle's Enchantment" is another good story; this hews closer to the typical Baumian tale of an earth character meandering through a fantasy land. Though bringing an earth character into the animal fairy tale renders these stories more enjoyable than the ones in Animal Fairy Tales, I'm not exactly disappointed that after this book, Baum basically ditched the form. I am disappointed that Policeman Bluejay never made a comeback, though.

Star Trek: Mere Anarchy
by Mike W. Barr, Christopher L. Bennett, Margaret Wander Bonanno, Dave Galanter, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, and Howard Weinstein
This excellent set of original Star Trek stories was already covered in a reading roundup spotlight: the last of three this month!

Captain Britain and MI13, Vol. 1: Secret Invasion
by Paul Cornell with Chris Claremont
My second-favorite Doctor Who writer returns to Marvel Comics with this, the first volume of his new ongoing. He easily and adeptly demonstrates what makes so good, by turning in a cracking good invasion story that manages to tell us what it means to be British and what it means to be a hero at the same time. Probably because they're pretty much the same thing. Cornell is a wizard at comic writing; this book is filled with moments where you turn the page and a shiver goes down your spine because what's happened is just so dang cool. I'm a little disgruntled about the fate of one character, but the sheer awesome contained in the rest of this book makes up for that. I look forward to the many collections to come as much as I mourn the fact that the series was canceled just as I began it. (This volume also contains an entirely forgettable backup story, a reprint of two 1970s issues of Marvel Team-Up where Captain Britain meets Spider-Man. They fight a guy who tries to kill them by putting them in a gigantic underground pinball machine. Um...)

Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Manga: Boukenshin
by David Gerrold, Diane Duane, Christine Boylan & F. J. DeSanto
Tokyopop is branching out with the fourth volume of its Star Trek manga, the first to tackle a series other than the original. The results prove that Troi was just made for the manga medium; the look just suits her somehow. The best is certainly Diane Duane's "Sensation", a story that lets both Troi and Crusher shine in a way The Next Generation itself rarely did; it also features some fantastic art from Star Trek newcomer Chrissy Delk. David Gerrold's "Changeling", on the other hand, makes absolutely no sense and is annoyingly didactic to boot. Plus Gerrold's Wesley is horrendously out-of-character, though his Worf is hilarious. This is barely saved by the art of E. J. Su, my favorite regular on these books, who can draw a disturbingly hot female Wesley. In the middle quality-wise are "The Picardian Knot" by Christine Boylan and "Loyalty" by F. J. DeSanto. They both follow up classic episodes: the former "Sarek" and the latter "The Best of Both Worlds". "The Picardian Knot" never really comes together; Don Hudson stiff artwork (he's easily my least favorite regular artist on these books) doesn't help either. "Loyalty", on the other hand, is a solid Riker story filling an interesting continuity gap. And it has some good Wesley jokes.

Replay
by Ken Grimwood
A man dies in 1988... and wakes up in 1963 at the age of eighteen. A simple, perhaps well-trod premise, but Ken Grimwood carries it off fantastically. Though I found the book a little uninvolving at first-- Jeff's emotional state at finding himself in 1963 wasn't very well communicated-- it rapidly picked up and soon become outright engrossing; I zipped through this thing in just over a day. What Jeff finds out is that even when you do things differently, they're not necessarily any better, even if you are rich. A trite lesson perhaps, but it doesn't feel that way when you're reading, such is Grimwood's ability in pulling it off. You really do feel dissatisfied when Jeff does, and happy when Jeff does. He keeps on reaching 1988, dying again, and finding himself in 1963 again, and every time he tries things a little bit or a lot bit differently. In the end, I think he's searching for companionship; it's what sets his worthwhile replays apart from the less rewarding ones, whatever form it takes. The ending is unexpected (though I feel like it shouldn't've been), but strong. A very good book on the whole, with much to recommend it.

From Polders to Postmoderism: A Concise History of Archival Theory
by John Ridener
The last book of the month that I've already covered in detail in a reading roundup spotlight, I found it interesting but had some complaints.

Adam Bede
by George Eliot
When I read Silas Marner, I felt like I'd read a well-written story where nothing interesting had happened. After reading Adam Bede, I know why I felt that way-- Eliot just can't do something interesting in a mere two hundred pages. She takes her time: time to build the characters, time to let them work their ways into situations. It can take a long time, but it's time well-spent, because once she has everything in place, this novel just takes off. Hetty Sorrel's cross-country flight is amazing and captivating and heart-rending. You feel what she is feeling every step of the way, you feel her anguish and triumph and despair. Especially the despair. Eliot's prose is amazing: Hetty, having failed to find her lover Arthur and make him account for what has happened to her, sits by a dark pool in the night and tries to drown herself in it, but she doesn't have the strength of character to do even that. And so, "She set her teeth when she thought of Arthur: she cursed him, without knowing what her cursing would do: she wished he too might know desolation, and cold, and a life of shame that he dare not end by death." Fabulous! All the other characters are just as well drawn, from the title character to Dinah Morris to the random villagers, and Eliot does a fantastic job of making them all people you empathize with and understand, no matter what they do. I was swept up in this book (though admittedly, the last fifty or so pages drag a bit), and I will eagerly seek out more Eliot now.

Hard Time: For These Times
by Charles Dickens
The first time I'd read this book, I hadn't read any Dickens beyond A Christmas Carol. I haven't read much more since (not quite half of Our Mutual Friend), but I've read enough to know Dickens can do better than this. Dickens is sometimes attack for writing caricatures instead of characters, but these folks really are characters. And I enjoy Dickens's names as much as the next person, but "McChoakumchild" isn't even trying. The first couple chapters, showing life at the Gradgrind school, are fantastic, but after that there is nothing interesting or involving in this book. All the protagonists, without fail, are dull dull dull. Even at 200 pages, this book was a slog and chore.

Star Trek: Voyager: Full Circle
by Kirsten Beyer
Five years after its last installment, the Voyager relaunch finally resumes under new authorship. The first half of this book is bogged down in one of the least interesting plots from the previous novels, spending hundreds of pages on the dullest sort of Klingon story. It picks up a bit in the second half, which feels like it comes out of a totally different novel about a totally different thing, but this part of the story... well, "story" might be overstating it; it's more a series of events that happen to occur in a certain order. Beyer demonstrates a stronger grasp of Voyager than Christie Golden did with her last few books... but that's a textbook example of damning with faint praise. I just don't think the Voyager premise works outside the Delta Quadrant, because the Voyager premise is the Delta Quadrant... and I never really cared about the Voyager characters enough to give a damn about what happens to them afterward. Except for the Doctor, but he's scarcely in this one. Despite my tepidness towards this book, I still feel myself drawn towards its sequel, Unworthy, though I can't explain why...

Star Trek: Countdown
by Mike Johnson & Tim Jones with Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
This is the official prequel to the new Star Trek film, showing the 24th-century events that lead up to Spock and Nero's journeys back in time. "Ridiculous" is probably the best way to sum up this book, sometimes in a good way (the Enterprise-E with Captain Data in command shows up to save Nero from Remans), sometimes in a bad way (Worf is a general in the Klingon Empire now... and also an idiot). Weirdly, Vulcan seems to have withdrawn from the Federation by the time of this story, but such a development is apparently not worth explaining or exploring. This book's biggest successes are giving Nero a reasonably interesting backstory (he's still no Khan, though) and showing a Geordi La Forge who is actually doing something with his life. Oh, and David Messina's art, of course.

Books acquired in the month of May 2009:
1. Doctor Who and the Crusaders by David Whitaker
2. Canopus in Argos: Archives 5: Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire by Doris Lessing
3. From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory by John Ridener
4. Star Trek: Countdown by Mike Johnson & Tim Jones with Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman
5. Star Trek by Alan Dean Foster
( #6 - 15 )

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 215

Most of these covers are courtesy of LibraryThing, though many I uploaded to the site myself. Clicking any of them (or any other book-link in this entry) will take you the book's work page on the same site; clicking a series link will take you to its series page. Hovering a mouse over a book cover/link will reveal details on my acquisition of said book.

Steve

Another journey, and I'm back, not quite a week since I left.  Things are much the same as always here in Connecticut.  My mailbox was chock full of books upon my return.  Things I did this past week:

Sunday afternoon was my sister's high school graduation party.  This was fortuitous for me, as it meant that my entire extended family and many family friends were gathered in one place, allowing me to touch base with basically everyone ever in a short period of time.  I like to think of the party as being a "Welcome Home Steve" party; these people get to see Catherine all they want, but how often are they blessed with my presence?  Not often enough, of course.  A couple members of the extended fam failed to show (Dickmans, of course), but what can you do?  At least I got to see Laura's wedding ring. (Over the past couple months, I have gone from being the only engaged cousin to being one of three.  Quite frankly, this is ridiculous.) I also got to eat some layered jello and play cornhole.  What else could you want?

Monday evening was Catherine's actual graduation.  Ursuline being an all-girl Catholic school, the graduating students don't wear robes, but rather white dresses.  Perhaps the coolest part of the ceremony is that after receiving their diplomas from the president of the school, they are then given laurel wreath crowns by a family member (my father, in my sister's case).  Catherine being Catherine, she got an award for being in the top three of her graduating class.  I'm convinced she overachieves solely to make me look bad.  This fall, she'll be starting at Saint Louis University, where she'll no doubt continue that practice.  It's hard to believe that the little girl who I can remember sleeping in a crib with a pumpkin costume when she came home from the hospital on Halloween is now technically an adult and about to go off on her own; next thing I know, she'll be developing an interest in boys.  Hopefully that's a few more years off.

Tuesday, I carried out an ill-judged Used Bookstore Tour of Cincinnati: four Half-Price Books in one afternoon.  Like most things I do that are ill-judged, I mention it as frequently as possible to forestall any potential criticism.  I came home with eleven books; when I told Hayley this, she exclaimed, "That's it!?"  This bodes well for the future.  You can learn all about them in the June Reading Roundup.  That night, David Dirr and I dropped in on the week's Boy Scout meeting to prove to the boys that there is indeed life after Troop 641.  It was a pleasure and an ego-boost as always.  I'm still on the troop roster, apparently; it's hard to believe that I've been involved with it in some capacity for over thirteen years now.  Also hard to believe how many of these boys are about to get their Eagles.  Most people are much better Boy Scouts than I ever was, apparently.  Afterwards, my dad helped me change my oil, by which I mean, he changed my oil while I unscrewed the caps off the bottles.

On Wednesday, I hung out with David Poon in his brand-new mansion.  It is smaller than his old one, but it makes up for this with a personal theater and light switches so complicated they utilize a Start menu.  We ate Arby's and watched Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, both at my insistence.  I enjoyed the former and had mixed feelings about the latter.  I like curly fries a lot; not so much cutting Gene Hackman dialogue.  That evening, my family had a nice dinner all together at P. F. Chang's, one of the few times we were all in the same place at the same time all week.  That's always nice.  Afterwords, my dad helped me replace my brake pads, by which I mean, he replaced my brake pads while I held a flashlight or screwdriver.  And then I was introduced to Rummikub,

Thursday afternoon, my mother made on early birthday present of going shopping for clothes with me.  Which is good, because left to my own devices I'd just go on wearing the shirts I have that are five years old and thus way too big for me.  That evening, I met up with not only David Dirr, but our former comrade-in-arms, Brad Knipper, who we'd not seen for God knew how long.  We hit up two Cincinnati mainstays, Skyline and Graeter's, and caught up, since we've all been all over the place this last year.

And then on Friday morning, I was gone again!  My lovely mother made me breakfast, and then I hit the road at 7:30am.  No quick 11.5-hour journey this time, though, since I took a detour to the middle of blooming nowhere in Northeast Ohio, to look over a possible wedding site.  It was actually pretty cool; just talking to the guy who owns the place was nice, but it's certainly a top contender... and we don't have any other contenders.  But navigating to and from there provided its own special set of fun adventures, though I managed to avoid getting lost with my usual aplomb.  I had to drive through Amish country, so I saw plenty of horses-and-buggies and people wearing bonnets.  Also: signs for cheese shops.  Pennsylvania was even more boring than usual, though, and I couldn't find a single Taco Bell in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton corridor.  Some light rain in New York and western Connecticut also slowed me down, so I got in around 10:30pm.  A fifteen-hour journey, though about 1.5 of that was spent looking at Nature's Retreat.  Phew!

I don't think I'll be going home again until Thanksgiving.  Which is an awful long time!  Not to wax rhapsodic, but it was nice to be back in Cincinnati with my family for a bit.

Steve

Occasionally, I like to stretch my reviewing wings and hit you all with a review too long to fit in a standard reading roundup. You've gotten two of those already for May's reading; this here is your last one before the reading roundup proper for May shows up. Anthologies tend to get these a lot because it's hard to handle multiple stories in my usual 200-word capsule reviews. Thus, this time out I am reviewing the novella anthology Star Trek: Mere Anarchy by Mike W. Barr, Christopher L. Bennett, Margaret Wander Bonanno, Dave Galanter, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore, and Howard Weinstein, as edited by the redoubtable Keith R.A. DeCandido.

I think some of the best tie-in fiction tells stories that can't be told in the parent medium. Sometimes, as with Dave Galanter's Troublesome Minds, this is simply a matter of all the people involved in the production of your series having broken up some forty years ago. Sometimes, as with The New Doctor Who Adventures, it is a matter of telling stories too broad and deep for the small screen. Sometimes, as with Star Trek's Invasion! tetralogy, it's a matter of telling stories that span time in a way that could only be done in retrospect; you can have a Voyager story come out a month after the original series story it's a sequel to. (Doctor Who lets you take this a step further into impossibility, by having a fifth Doctor story come out a month after the sixth Doctor story it's a sequel to.) Mere Anarchy is one of these impossible stories: six individual novellas, each telling about an encounter with the planet Mestiko, spanning nearly thirty years of Star Trek history. The first story takes place before the original series even began in "Where No Man Has Gone Before", the last one occurs shortly after it draws to a close in the Generations prologue, and the rest happen at scattered points in between.

But it's not just the crew of the starship Enterprise we see evolve over this story; it's the people of the planet Mestiko as well, especially Raya elMora, a Payav environmental activist who events throw into a place of prominent leadership. Raya is an excellent character: her being written by six different writers (counting Wardilmore as a composite entity, of course) at six different periods in her life (she is, in fact, the only character to appear in all six parts of the book) of course gives her a certain amount of depth and complexity, but I suspect that had she only appeared in just one book, she'd still have been pretty memorable.

The series might purport to be "the saga of one crew's career long relationship to one world", but that's not quite true-- it's perhaps the book's one major failing that it's mostly just James T. Kirk's relationship to Mestiko, and especially to Raya. We don't get much of an impression how Spock, McCoy, and the rest relate to the people-- each character gets a moment or two across the entire book, but Kirk gets multiple moments in each individual story, giving us a stronger feeling of what Mestiko means to him than anyone else. This starts from the very first story, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore's "Things Fall Apart", which tells of the disaster that befalls Mestiko and kicks off the entire series. It's a pretty straightforward action/adventure story of the type that Ward and Dilmore typically excel at, but by far the book's best scene is the one where Kirk-- as this point only a few months into his captaincy-- has a talk with his original chief medical officer, Doctor Mark Piper. It's an exceptional scene, showcasing Kirk's tendency to try to carry the weight of entire worlds on his shoulder, and fleshing out a character who got about five minutes of screentime in the original series (and in a way that doesn't make him a carbon copy of Doctor McCoy). This strong scene lifts an otherwise average story.

The depiction of Kirk's relationship with Mestiko tends to make or break most of the stories in the book-- Mike W. Barr's "The Centre Cannot Hold" is a fine enough original series trouble-with-meddlesome-Klingons stories, but aside from a scant few moments, Mestiko could pretty much be any planet in trouble here. On the other hand, the story introduces the character of Doctor Marat Lon, one of the book's most interesting characters, a Martian scientist who eventually "goes native" with the Payav. There's nothing bad about this story, but it's definitely the lightest and the shortest.

Kirk's relationship with Mestiko is at the forefront of Dave Galanter's "Shadows of the Indignant", which surprised me by being my favorite one in the book. His latter-era books have typically not done a whole lot for me, but with this, his first original series effort (aside from a short story in Constellations), he hits it out of the park. The only Enterprise characters in the book are Kirk, at this point an admiral and Chief of Starfleet Operations, and McCoy, retired and in private practice, and from scene one, he captures both of these characters perfectly. I typically don't make much of an effort to match actors' voices to dialogue in books, but with this story, I couldn't help hearing William Shatner and DeForest Kelley reading every line. And it's a good, fun story to boot. I was already looking forward to Galanter's novel Troublesome Minds, but now that feeling has only intensified.

The most problematic story in the book was probably Christopher L. Bennett's "The Darkness Drops Again". Unlike all the other stories in the book, which show a single visit to Mestiko, this one spans three separate encounters with the planet over an eight-year period, more than the first three stories cover all together. The disjointed nature of the story does it no favors; there's no strong narrative drive here, and so it simply ends up feeling like a series of unconnected incidents. The thrust of the story is about Raya's exile from and return to Mestiko, and this is its strongest point, as it shows her as a fully fleshed-out character, her determination to help her planet showcased in both positive and negative lights. But the middle visit has nothing to do with anything, even though it is nice to see Doctor Lon again. (Not so nice to get an adolescent sexual innuendo from his wife, but them's the breaks, I suppose.) On the last visit, however, Kirk is not present (this part takes place while he's retired from Starfleet), and this shows up the weakness of the other characters' relationships to the planet; with Spock and McCoy as the viewpoint characters, there's just not the same level of urgency or interest in Mestiko. It's a positive in depicting how much Mestiko and Kirk mean to one another, I suppose, but it doesn't make for interesting reading. (Clark Terrell, captain of the Reliant, steps into the gap for a scene, too, but it ends up feeling totally random and intrusive.) Also, the characters have a tendency to get a little preachy with one another in this story-- which is fine, I know plenty of preachy people, except that the recipients of this preaching are somewhat unrealistically cool with it. "The Darkness Drops Again" works well in showcasing Mestiko's evolution in reacting to the Pulse (though I'm tired of hypocritical religious fanatics as villains), but as an actually story, it's too diffuse to be effective.

If I were going to accuse another story in the book of tending toward of somewhat generic planet-of-the-week storyline, it would be Howard Weinstein's "The Blood-Dimmed Tide", but fortunately a few aspects actually ended up elevating the story to being my second-favorite in the volume. For one thing, it's just a really dang good generic planet-of-the-week storyline. The crew are characterized perfectly (I could hear the actors again), and the twists and turns are genuinely exciting; I raced through this one to see what would happen next. Plus, there's some more excellent material with Raya elMora, as she deals with an unexpected twist in her relationship with her protege, Theena elMadej. (This twist is one of those things a book like this can do well; having seen Theena as a child from the earliest installments, what happens to her here is even more effective.) Raya's troubles are at the center of this book, given that it also culminates her relationship with Elee, her grandmother, who'd been an (excellent) recurring character in the previous installments. This is perhaps one of the most continuity-heavy stories in the book, as it sets up some of what will transpire in The Undiscovered Country, but it works very well: it's a good quadrant politics story. Weinstein has been absent from Star Trek fiction for far too long; we haven't had a full novel from him since 1994's The Better Man! Hopefully we get him back sometime.

As "Its Hour Come Round" takes place after Kirk's disappearance in Star Trek: Generations, one would expect it to suffer from a lack of Captain Kirk, but Margaret Wander Bonanno actually elevates this lack to a centerpiece of the story, which really makes it work. Almost all the characters here, from the Enterprise crew to Raya elMora to Chancellor Azetbur of the Klingon Empire, are defined by the lack of Captain Kirk. Bonanno's stories since she returned to Star Trek fiction in 2004 haven't done a whole lot for me, but I think that's because they haven't been very original crew-centric; she's back in her element with this one. All of the characters, especially McCoy, are pitch-perfect as they try to deal with the loss of a man who meant so much to them. Kirk might not be physically present in this one, but he's still very much a character in it. My only complaint (and what stops this from being the best story in the book) is its too-sudden conclusion; one storyline had been wrapped up, but I feel like there was more to say about Raya and Mestiko before the end.

I think the biggest tribute I could make to this book is that I don't want to know what's happened to Mestiko by the 24th century. My knee-jerk reaction was to wonder how the planet had ended up a century later, but then I realized that any such followup would be hollow. So much of this excellent book is defined by the planet's relationship with the original Enterprise crew, as embodied in Kirk and Raya, that a story about the planet without any of those characters would just be disappointing; Keith DeCandido and his crack team of writers just did their jobs too well here. I was excited about this project from the moment it was first announced back in 2006, and I'm pleased that upon finally reading it, it took advantage of its unique situation to tell a magnificent story that only a project like this really could.

Steve

I don't half get some strange stuff to review from the EarlyReviewers program.  Of course, it's my fault, as I ask for it.  Apparently I though I'd be interested in archival theory back when I requested From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory by John Ridener.  I guess I still am?  Or was?

From Polders to Postmodernism provides much what the title claims it does.  Ridener breaks archival theory down into four major periods: consolidation (late 19th century), confirmation and reinforcement (post-WWI), modernism (post-WWII), and questioning (the present).  With each of these periods, he provides a brief sketch of what that particular theory entailed, who developed it (the first three are each the work of one particular individual), and what circumstances led to its creation.  Though it probably helps to be somewhat familiar with archival theory before reading, I assume this book is meant to be accessible to a non-specialist; why else would it have been distributed through such a non-targeted program as EarlyReviewers?  That's where this book falls down a bit-- I almost never had a clear idea of what any of these archival theories actually entailed.  What sets modernism apart from confirmation and reinforcement?  Who knows?  This is probably an area where being a "concise history" hurts the book; a more fleshed-out history could have explained each of these in depth.

Ridener provides a lot of background and context for each theory, showing how it rose out of the context of the time and place of its creation.  He does this well-- almost too well.  Consolidation, for example, is derived from what was going on in the Netherlands in the late 19th century, whereas conformation and reinforcement comes out of postwar British problems.  It is hard to understand, then, why we should see all of these linking together as one continuous story: it's like writing a history of literature that connects Wilkie Collins to William Faulkner simply because one follows the other chronologically.  Certainly there could be connections between these different theories, but Ridener's explanations are so rooted in the times of their creations that it's hard to see them.  Consolidation must have spread from the Netherlands to the rest of the world for some reason, but why?  What conditions existed in the world of archival theory as a whole, not just in one country, that made consolidation dominate archival theory?  Ridener himself acknowledges this circumstance, saying that "Each of the paradigms discussed above come from countries with specific and independent archival needs created as a function of varied geographic location.... the geographic factor played a very important role by isolating archivists in their own theoretical situations" (153).  How the local needs became universal and how these isolated archivists connected with each others' work are both notions that Ridener never satisfactorily addresses.

His rooting in specific time periods can also go a bit too far; he has a tendency to claim that every single societal shift contributed to changes in archival theory.  When discussing the questioning era, he says that "The Civil Rights, Women's Rights, Gay Rights, and anti-war movements of the 20th century, coupled with the entrenchment of the Cold War and possibility of total destruction through nuclear war, created a new cultural and social landscape that required significant shifts in records and record keeping" (103).  I doubt that gay marriage much affected the way our government maintains archives.  (Maybe it did, but if so, Ridener never shows a correlation.) Focusing in on specific historical trends that affected specific archival ones would have worked much better.

Of course, I always find that it's easier to criticize works of nonfiction than to praise.  I can point out where it ignores something or leaves something unsaid or unexamined; there's no real way to go through and list every thing the work does right.  And it in general is quite fine.  Though I think its conciseness hurts it a little, it usually presents an acceptable history, showing the background of each theory it deals with.  Not the most riveting of reads, but I doubt that anyone expected otherwise; as far as academic books go, it's rather average in that regard.  I really think this book's largest problem is not aiming itself at the layman enough.  Without a full comprehension of each archival theory, it's hard to see the paradigm shifts that Ridener says are always occurring: to me, modernism seems much the same as confirmation and reinforcement.  Isn't it all just storing records?

My biggest complaint, however, is that I have no flipping clue what a "polder" even is.

Steve

There's something I always find a bit odd about car journeys. According to Google Maps, I live 783 miles from my family's home in Cincinnati, going by its recommended route. Google tells me that such a journey should take 12 hours and 45 minutes. That's a while. Plane journeys, by comparison, are so quick as to be meaningless. You never feel like you've actually traveled so much as dematerialized from Point A and rematerialized at Point B (except when you're flying to Europe or some other transoceanic location, I suppose). But when you drive, you see every single intermediate point roll right by you.

There's a lot of intermediate points in 783 miles. There's a lot of intermediate points in 12 hours and 45 minutes. I don't think you ever quite realize how far away you are until you think of it in terms of time. If you spend all of your time doing nothing but traveling, it will take you half a day to get from Vernon to Cincinnati. You can do a lot in half a day; all you've succeeded in doing is changing your geographical position. (Of course, we're spoiled; I'm reminded of the words of Mrs. Goodenough in Wives and Daughters. Probably because I watched it last week.) It's not a quick journey, or one easily taken; this is only your second trip home since you moved to Connecticut.

Yet somehow, despite the distance being so huge, it is so easily bridged. One point becomes the next, becomes the next, becomes the next. Before you know it, you're in New York; before you know it, you've spent four hours crossing northern Pennsylvania on the mostly empty I-80. One state slides into the next. As you head down I-71 into Cincinnati, familiar sights begin to appear with greater frequency. Cincinnati might be so far away from Vernon, but the two locations are very definitely connected; all those intermediate points create an unbreakable chain of location. Cross all of the points in between, and suddenly you have made it. You look at your clock as you swing pass Youngstown and find that you've been driving for seven hours; that's over halfway there!

And you've even accomplished more than changing your geographic location; in those 12 hours and 45 minutes, you've listened to the bonus features on Doctor Who: Hothouse, a mix CD a friend made you for the journey (listened to it twice, in fact), all of Doctor Who: The Mahogany Murders, and, most importantly, all thirteen half-hour installments of the original Star Wars radio drama, and you're once again tempted to declare Brock Peters a superior Darth Vader to James Earl Jones. You've also realized that you left the marked up copy of a paper you wanted to work on back in your apartment, of course, and that the headset you've used with a variety of phones for about a decade probably doesn't work any more. You've also seen Scranton, but you try not to remember that.

The second-best part of the journey is that when you reach the end, you get to see your family for the first time since January. The time of year is perfect, too-- just after Mother's Day, just before Father's Day and your brother's birthday, right when your sister graduates from high school.

The best part is that you only made two stops the entire time, and that you showed Google Maps what's what by doing the whole trip in 11 hours and 30 minutes.

Steve

Green Arrow: Quiver
Writer: Kevin Smith
Penciller: Phil Hester
Inker: Andre Parks
Colorist: Guy Major
Letterer: Sean Konot

DC Universe Timeline: 4 Years Ago
Real World Timeline: 2000?

(Harold Leeds was awarded "Civil Servant of the Year" on April 25, 1999, and it's implied that that was relatively recently. The individual comics making up this collection started coming out in early 2001, so that would make some sense. According to timelines I looked at, Quiver takes place the same year as the death/rebirth of Superman story arc, meaning that seven publishing years' worth of stories take place in the same year. That is insane. This story consistently refers to the events of the "hard-traveling heroes" arc of Green Lantern/Green Arrow, published in 1970-1, as having occurred ten years ago. I have a hard time buying that a story as rooted in its time as that could have transpired in the 1990s.)


In a way, Green Arrow was what started this long comics journey. But that's a long story and one I shan't be getting into right now, but that makes it appropriate that one of the comics James gave me was this, the first story of Green Arrow after his rebirth. You see, Oliver Queen had died back in 1995, thanks to some ecoterrorists, and Connor Hawke, his illegitimate son, had taken over as Green Arrow. But in 1996, during a crisis where the Earth's sun was shut off, Hal Jordan-- who Oliver Queen had previously killed or something-- brought Oliver back to life, though that was not revealed until this story, so I don't know what he got up to in all that time between. If there really was any time between.

( Green Arrow's totally not a Batman ripoff, I swear. )

I think the most important thing about Quiver is that though it deals with some crazy continuity, some abstract metaphysics, and some dark themes, is that it never loses its way. This book is about Oliver Queen/Green Arrow, what makes him a great hero and a sometimes not-so-great man, and about how he learns to come through in the end. And perhaps almost as importantly, it's always fun. Whoever doesn't love the boxing glove arrow ought to be lined up and shot.

Steve

I know these comics reviews have been... sporadic of late, but I've got a new plan, and you all should be seeing one a month at the least from now on. This means this project to read 21 of James's trade paperbacks, started in June 2008, will finally wrap up in April 2010 at the latest... oh dear.

Next up: Green Arrow: Sounds of Violence

Well, fun time's over. This past week I've had to get back to doing work! As I've mentioned before, I've a position with the Freshman English New Teaching Assistant Fall Orientation Oversight Committee, the main responsibilities of which are supposed to be handled last week and this week. I'm one of four people on the committee, not including the two graduate students who serve as assistant directors of FE. Our job is essentially to come up with everything that needs to happen during orientation: the schedule of events, content for those events, presenters, materials, rooms, food. We spent Monday through Wednesday working as a whole group on things like the schedule, wording of letters and a few Handbook items, and so on. Now we've split up to work on our own independent projects. My big thing is the Handbook; I'm supposed to put any new material into it, remove unneeded material, update old material, and so on. As you might imagine, since we've split up to work on individual projects, I've done very little actual work.

Ah, well, I'll do it tomorrow.

We reconvene as a whole group on Wednesday, to finish out the week once again working together.

The other thing that's been going on is my studying for the M.A. Exam. Or rather, lack thereof. We divided the reading list for the exam into enough events to cover the entire summer, typically two or three readings per week. For this week we were supposed to read book III of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, and Othello by You-Know-Who. Othello I'd already read, so I divided the other books up into chunks for Monday through Thursday so I'd have everything done in time for our Friday meeting.

Ha ha ha.

Monday evening, I ended up going to a party Jorge held at someone else's house. I'd totally forgotten about it until that afternoon when talking to the other Oversight folks. So that wiped out that evening. Tuesday evening was wiped out by me falling asleep shortly after getting home at 5:30pm and waking up at 10:30pm. Apparently I was tired. Wednesday evening was wiped out by me having dinner with Andrew and then having long phone conversations with people who had called me on Tuesday, James and Hayley. By Thursday, I decided that I was obviously never going to read The Faerie Queen, so I just read Doctor Faustus, which turned out to be a good decision, as it is a fantastic play. That evening was wiped out by the first meeting of the new English Graduate Student Organization Executive Board, of which I am a member in my new role as department representative to the Graduate Student Senate.

On Friday I thought about skimming through Othello but did not; I did end up reading some of the notes in the introduction to the edition of The Faerie Queen that I picked up from the library. So I was well-prepared for the discussion we had that night.

This week we have to read Adam Bede by George Eliot and Hard Times by Charles Dickens. I've read the latter, but I need to do a reread anyway, as I remember virtually nothing of it other than the hilarious classroom scene it opens with. We'll see how well this goes. I would prefer to not fail my exam.

Steve

P.S. Gosh dang, but there is a heavy thunderstorm going on here now. Awesome.

Sometimes I've no idea why LibraryThing's EarlyReviewer algorithm selects me for the books it does, but I'll always take a free book, even if it's by Kevin J. Anderson. I'm somewhat ashamed to say that I received a Leap by Anna Enquist back in February, and I've only now gotten around to reading and reviewing it. Their algorithm must be pretty lenient, though, as I've won two books since then despite my tardiness! (Though one of those was lost in the post.)

A Leap is a collection of six dramatic monologues according to the cover, but it really only consists of five, as two of them intertwine, demanding to be read in alternating parts. Enquist is Dutch (the monologues were translated by Jeannette K. Ringold), and all of the monologues take place in Europe, though not necessarily the Netherlands. Two of them occur during World War II, two in the early 20th century, and one in the present. All of them, however, feature, as the title might imply, characters about to step forward into the unknown, characters setting off on a journey.

Sometimes this journey is literal, as in the case of "Mendel Bronstein". A Dutch tailor sets out for America in 1912 and goes crazy. Why? Who knows. The monologue is short and undeveloped; Michael seems to descend into insanity almost instantaneously; he is obviously a little off from the beginning, but his descent is so sharp and sudden as to be uninvolving. One moment, he is pretty much fine, the next he is piercing his own eardrums. (Ouch!) There's nothing for the reader (or, I suppose, the listener) to grab onto here.

A more involving journey is depicted in the intertwined monologues, "Cato and Leendert". These are two young lovers caught in Rotterdam during the Nazi occupation of the city. Cato does not leave with her family so that she can meet up with her lover Leendert (perhaps not her brightest move), but Leendert never comes to her; he's forgotten her. He works at the city zoo and feels compelled to stay with the animals there as they await the German advance. The animals need to be killed, as it would be better for them to be shot than for them to suffer as the city burned down around them. Leendert is a coward, though: he won't fight, and he won't kill his lion when the time comes, either, preferring to set him free. Only then does he finally set out looking for Leendert, who has fallen into the grip of the terror that has consumed the city. The two lovers struggle their way through the city, trying to find one another, but only finding horror instead. They see each other in the end... but not quite. This one works very well, darkly affecting as it is, and though the two parallel stories don't have much in common in terms of plot, they both show two people struggling to come to terms with death, a coming to terms they try to find in each other, or rather their idealized versions of each other, for it never feels like Cato actually knows what Leendert is really like and vice versa. It's images of each other they seek solace in and where they ultimately find it as well, but it is a false solace.

Less literal journeys occupy the rest of the collection. "The Doctor" was probably my favorite in the book, a short, simple story about a black Dutch doctor in a hospital occupied by the Germans during World War II. He has to make a decision: does he save the life of a ruthless German colonel? It is no decision at all for him... but his choice haunts him as he goes forward. It would not have helped him to let the man die, but it did not help him to let the man live either. Perhaps ground that has been trod one too many times before, but it is covered simply and effectively.

I have mixed feelings about "Alma", which depicts the life of Gustav Mahler's wife. Alma is a budding composer who gives up her own music to be with the man she loves-- an idea I find ridiculous and abhorrent. Her journey is her married life with Gustav; her narrative is her struggle with whether or not it was the right thing for her to do; she seems to regret it, but she does really love him and want to stand by him. Alma is very well sketched in this monologue, the longest of those in the books. I may disagree with every choice she makes, but I understand them all. This monologue is (appropriately) the only one to incorporate music; it also has a level of specificity about the staging that the others do not. I don't know that I like Alma as a person, but I like her story, and this is the one I would most wish to see performed.

Last both in the book and in this review is "...And I am Sara". Sara is a modern young woman who graduates from college and finds out that the world is not quite what she expected. Her office job is tedious, yet she is almost too afraid to do anything else. The story of a disaffected college graduate is ground a little too well trod for Enquist to do anything too interesting with it. Especially disappointing is the ending: many of the monologues in the book end this same way, but here it just feels gratuitous and cruel. Sara's story resonates, but she's just not interesting enough as a person to involve me the way the stories of Alma, the doctor, and Cato and Leendert did. It's good enough, but I feel like just from this book that Enquist could do better.

Almost all of the monologues in a Leap are strong, showing people embarking on interesting and life-changing journeys. I don't have much experience with the form myself, but I would think that what a good monologue should do is get inside someone's head fully and completely, and with the sole exception of "Mendel Bronstein," this book definitely succeeds in that regard. I'd like to see almost any of these performed, to be honest.

Steve