Reading Roungup Wrapup: March 2019

Pick of the month: Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies by C. S. Forester. Not the last Hornblower novel written, but it is the last chronologically, and I found it a moving and heartwarming final set of adventures for Hornblower, with some of Forester's best writing across the entire series. Going back to the Mr. Midshipman format of a series of standalone short stories gives it a nice scope. Not the best Hornblower novel, but certainly one of the better ones.

All books read:
1. Star Trek: Burden of Knowledge by Scott & David Tipton
2. Lieutenant Hornblower by C. S. Forester
3. Mister Miracle by Tom King
4. Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil by Jeff Smith
5. Hornblower and the Atropos by C. S. Forester
6. Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies by C. S. Forester
7. Hornblower and the Hotspur by C. S. Forester
8. The Expanse: Drive by James S.A. Corey
9. The Hornblower Companion by C. S. Forester

All books acquired:
1. Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea: Stories by Sarah Pinsker

Books remaining on "To read" list: 649 (down 5)
Books remaining on "To review" list: 24 (down 1)

"the harmonious voice of all science fiction": The St. Xavier High School Science Fiction Club, 2004-????

Like most hairbrained things I did in high school, I think the Science Fiction Club can be blamed on Chris.

I don't know how or why he came up with it, only that he did. It was our sophomore year. We would meet weekly to watch or otherwise discuss science fiction. Us being us, I think we put more work into the organizational structure than anything else. According to our Constitution (written by Chris and revised by our friend James):

We the fans of science fiction declare in one voice, not a voice of Star Trek, Star Wars, or Babylon 5, but the harmonious voice of all science fiction, that this document shall bring order to chaos, provide an open forum for all of science fiction, and secure the Blessings of the future to ourselves and our school, and thus do ordain and establish this Constitution of the Science Fiction Club.

Additionally, according to Article V, Section 2: "Membership as well as suffrage cannot be denied due to grade level, science fiction preferences, or political preferences. Membership and suffrage is a right of all students of St. Xavier High School."

Other clubs had presidents; presidents were boring. We would have a Lord Chancellor. Other clubs had vice presidents; vice presidents were boring. We would have a Vice Chancellor. Other clubs had treasurers; treasurers were boring. We would have a Minister of the Purse. Other clubs had secretaries; secretaries were boring. We would have a Minister of Information.

Though then we ran into the problem that our core friend group ran five deep, and we had only come up with four positions. Well, why not an ominously titled organization with a vague remit so that we could enact secret powers? Hence, we had a Minister of Internal Affairs.

Our executive committee equivalent was called "Starfleet Command."

I don't know how I ended up Lord Chancellor, because no one would ever want me to run anything, especially not at age 15. Chris was Vice Chancellor (I think he wanted the real power, but to avoid scrutiny.) The Lord Chancellor ran for election and appointed his Starfleet Command, but we always worked hard to suppress any opposition, so that the same five of us filled the same positions for all three years.

Soon executive departments were proliferating (I think this is what other people would call ad hoc committees). According to my executive orders (still saved on an external hard drive!), we had a Party Commission, a Book Commission, a Commission on Patches and Shirts, a Bureau of Web Affairs, a National Interests Authority, and a Department of Organization and Rules. Somewhat astoundingly, in retrospect, I wasn't part of that last one.

(According to the public document, the NIA "[a]ssist[ed] in the smooth functioning of the Science Fiction Club by providing cross-departmental coordination," but according to a secret document, it "defend[ed] the Science Fiction Club from outside forces and protects its well-being. Also provides for a militia." The DOR had the secret task of "[f]urther[ing] Starfleet Command’s control of the Science Fiction Club by creating slowdown procedures and extensive paperwork to stifle unwanted resolutions"!)

((I'm not sure why this was needed at all, because the constitution itself was pretty un-democratic. The Lord Chancellor got to decide if issues submitted by members were major or minor; minor issues got voted on by the whole club directly with a simple majority, but major issues needed first majority approval by Starfleet Command, and then two-thirds approval by the membership. So I could basically kill any unwanted motion by declaring it major. Starfleet Command was appointed by me, so it's not likely they'd go against my wishes!))

Most of the time we'd watch random movies. That's where I first saw Stargate, Gattaca, the John Hurt 1984, and Blade Runner, for example. Sometime we'd do theme months: for a Cyborg Month, we watched one installment of Remembrance of the Daleks a week and then an episode of another show featuring a cyborg (e.g., "The Best of Both Worlds"). My senior year, I was responsible for driving home my brother and his friend Kurt and the German exchange student living with Kurt; Kurt was a participant. I remember Kurt making fun of the Daleks during episode one of Remembrance... and him excitingly explaining to Georg how awesome the Special Weapons Dalek when we were driving home after watching episode four.

We had a Time Travel Month, and every year we did an Anime Month. (That was to appease the club's anime-lovers; without that sort of designated slot, I think they would have pushed for us to watch anime all the time.) I complained a lot at the time, but given it was my introduction to Patlabor, I probably shouldn't.

Some of the best stuff was not movies, though. We had a Klingon Month. Weeks one and two we watched Star Trek VI, but week three we did Federation vs. Klingons capture the flag, and then week four we did a Klingon feast. I made bloodwine by mixing red koolaid with red Jello. I think someone else made bloodworm pie with gummy worms. We played the Star Trek: The Next Generation VCR Board Game and Star Trek Monopoly. We borrowed buzzers from the Quiz Team to do a Star Wars trivia match (using cards from Star Wars Trivial Pursuit), and I was made quizmaster, because everyone knew I would win if I played.

We occasionally did "literary bonanzas" where people read bits of books aloud. I don't remember specifically, but I am sure James probably read a political treatise part of 1984; it's exactly what he would do. I remember reading all of Italo Calvino's tremendous "The Light Years," which took a lot longer than I expected (I think 30 minutes!) but seemed to go over well.

I have some pretty good memories of those days.

It's because of Science Fiction Club that I ended up making Doctor Who audio dramas for fun, and from there Star Trek and Star Wars and original sf ones. One of those Star Trek audio dramas provided the kernel for (and shares a title with) my Star Trek novel, A Choice of Catastrophes.

It did persist beyond the five of us. I don't know exactly how long, but Chris once went back and talked to a group of club members, none of whom had ever actually known us, just knew our names from the founding documents, and approached us with awe and respect. (Like the Thermians in Galaxy Quest, at least according to Chris's telling.)

I went back once myself; they were watching Red vs. Blue. It was dreadfully unfunny. Like all once-great institutions, it had decayed into a shadow of its former self. I don't know if it still exists, though it seems unlikely to me.

I don't know if my friends did, but I always listed the SFC on my extracurriculars when applying to college. At a scholarship interview at Xavier University, an admissions official asked me, "...but why Lord Chancellor?"

"Because it's cooler than a president."

#417: What role do school clubs and teams play in your life?

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Sir Willoughby Patterne (The Egoist, 1879)

Trade paperback, 606 pages
Published 1978 (originally 1879)
Acquired January 2019
 Read February 2019

The Egoist by George Meredith

'The world has faults; glaciers have crevices, mountains have chasms; but is not the effect of the whole sublime? Not to admire the mountain and the glacier because they can be cruel, seems to me . . . And the world is beautiful.'
     'The world of nature, yes. The world of men?'
     'Yes.'
     'My love, I suspect you to be thinking of the world of ballrooms.'
     'I am thinking of the world that contains real and great generosity, true heroism. We see it round us.'
     'We read of it. The world of the romance writer!'
     'No: the living world. I am sure it is our duty to love it. I am sure we weaken ourselves if we do not.' (100)

This book was recommended to me by a graduate student I met at NAVSA; when I told him about my project on Victorian scientist novels, he asked if I had read The Egoist. I had not. I had actually never read any George Meredith, as far as I know. Now that I have read it, George Meredith strikes me as one of those Victorian novelists we are probably better off not reading. The Egoist is supposedly about the necessity of comedy to puncture egoism-- but it strikes me as something of a bad idea to begin your supposed paean to comedy with an incredibly unfunny and overly pedantic explanation of why humor is important.

Anyway, there are moments of what I'm interested in in this overly long and tedious novel, but there are better examples. Sir Willoughby Patterne is a man of science, sort of vaguely defined-- I don't think we ever learn what kind of science he actually does even though he's in his laboratory a lot of time-- and this does affect his romantic relationships. His egoism means he always needs to get his way, is always trying to bend his fiancée to his will. Science doesn't seem to be to blame though, because even though he's in the laboratory so much, he supposedly mostly does it because science is popular; his true passion is sport (46). On the other hand, his devotion to the laboratory is more complete than that of his rivals (71), so even if it's not his passion per se, he throws himself into it.

There is an emphasis on how he sees the world; as my epigraph above indicates, he doesn't see the world the same as his fiancée Clara, because his perceptions come from science, while hers come from ballrooms and romances. The biggest consequence of his egoism seems to be that he thinks he understands himself more than he actually does understand himself. That seems a scientific problem-- the scientist has to have the ego to believe they understand the world better, and that ego is not always warranted-- but other Victorian scientist novels deal with the topic better than Meredith does. Stay away if you can.

Review: Hornblower: Ship of the Line by C. S. Forester

Trade paperback, 323 pages
Published 1966 (originally 1938)
Acquired May 2007 
Previously read April 2008 
Reread January 2019

Ship of the Line by C. S. Forester

1810
When I originally read this book, as the seventh Hornblower story in chronological order, I wasn't much into it:

Honestly, I think I find Horatio a bit less interesting to read about as an accomplished captain than when he's younger. I don't know if it's due to something intrinsic to the more unsure (and less insane) character of the earlier books or just because of the fact that the earlier books were written later on and Forester sharpened his skills as he went. Certainly it does help that young Hornblower didn't spend all his time mooning over Lady Barbara, though. This book feels less like a novel and, like Hornblower and the Atropos before it, more like a series on incidents that just happen to occur in order on the same ship. It's a little harder to get into as a result, and it might be my least favorite novel in the series yet, but there's still some to enjoy, particularly Hornblower's sneaky impressment of the crews of the East India Company and his ability to be always brilliant, such as when he takes out three forts single-handedly.

This time, reading it second in publication order, I enjoyed it much more. It's a rousing return for a character one wanted to see come back, like, say, the opening of Superman II. Hornblower is on the top of his form in this book, sailing from triumph to triumph to triumph. Last time that kind of irritated me, because it seemed like he faced no real challenges, but this time I enjoyed it, partially because I hadn't read as much Hornblower recently, and partially because I knew what was coming. Ship of the Line follows one of the classic trilogy structures, the one where the second installment ends in devastating defeat for the hero. Ship of the Line is filled with successes, then, to highlight the devastation of the failure at the end, and I think foreknowledge of that-- knowing that Hornblower is going to face a reckoning-- makes reading a novel about success after success after success a lot more enjoyable. (The bit about impressing the East India sailors I had totally forgotten about, and it was once again my favorite part. Impressment is such a bizarre practice, and one of the highlights of Ship of the Line is how much it delves into it.)

I do still struggle with Hornblower's relationship with Lady Barbara. One wants Hornblower to be pure and heroic, but he's not, and I guess that's good from the standpoint of complexity. Perhaps I'm too influenced by Ioan Gruffudd's performance on screen, but's hard for me to imagine him being unfaithful. In this novel, I did kind of reach an understanding of it, though. In Russell T Davies's The Writer's Tale, he talks about how a character's strengths and flaws should really be the same thing. I saw that here. Hornblower's sense of duty makes him into a superb commander and fighting machine, but it also makes him into a man who feels obligated to stay in a loveless marriage, and also refuses to act for his own pleasure outside that marriage. But as I read deeper into the series this interpretation of Hornblower's character didn't quite hold up...

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Typhon Pact: Zero Sum Game

Mass market paperback, 336 pages
Published 2010
Acquired September 2012
Read December 2017

Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Zero Sum Game

by David Mack

April-August 2382
There's a sort of Cold War analogy implicit in the Typhon Pact: its name derives, if I remember rightly, from the Warsaw Pact, and the Typhon polities are in a sort of Cold War competition with the Khitomer ones (i.e., the Federation and the Klingons). Zero Sum Game is an espionage thriller making use of that background: the Breen have stolen the slipstream drive schematics from Starfleet, hoping to develop a fleet of slipstream vessels for the Pact, and Julian Bashir and Sarina Douglas are assigned to destroy the plans before the prototype is launched. You can imagine this happening in a Tom Clancy novel with, I dunno, cruise missile plans or something.

On one level, this is an espionage thriller, and this is the kind of thing David Mack excels at. His solo Star Trek debut was the action-packed, emotional Wildfire; he followed this up books like the intense Failsafe and the similarly intense A Time to Kill and to Heal. Though I'm sure it's actually no easier than any other kind of writing is, it seems like Mack can shoot these things off in his sleep. Julian and Sarina go undercover, blow up some trains, meet some dissidents, infiltrate some bases, shoot some baddies, fight some torturers, and eventually blow up a ton of shit in an action-packed climax. It's well done and the book moves along quite zippily, and it was ideal reading for an airplane trip.

At the same time, Captain Ezri Dax on the Aventine is playing space chicken with Breen and Romulan forces, trying to stay in position for a slipstream extraction of Julian and Sarina. This is all well and good, though I find the personalities of the non-Ezri Aventine crew to range from "present" to "still there."

On another level, this is an exploration of the Breen, a Star Trek race that our knowledge of comes from a lot of random tidbits that don't entirely add up. The way Mack sews them all together is quite ingenious, making the Breen culture an amalgam of different species, enforcing a lack of prejudice by suits that ensure the true species of any given Breen is known only to themself. Thus the inconsistent information about the Breen is explained as encounters with different species. It's a really interesting idea, a sort of warped mirror of the Federation's equality as well as a take on Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron."

Unfortunately, the novel doesn't really do anything with it, except that the suits provide a convenient way for Julian and Sarina to sneak into Breen society undetected. I can imagine a novel that uses espionage and infiltration to explore an alien society (The Romulan Way kind of does this), but Zero Sum Game isn't it. We only meet two types of Breen here: dissidents who don't like the enforced equality, and nasty bad guys. (Well, plus a kind of nice engineer, but he's pretty pointless.) What is life like in Breen society? We have no sense of it, there's no real worldbuilding at all, and that seems like a shame and a huge missed opportunity. There's a scene where Julian and Douglas hang out in a market for hours, but we're told all they see is "mundane interactions." Given how different kinds of "markets" (say) an American shopping mall and a South African flea market are, to gloss over this is one of many missed opportunities when it comes to exploring Breen culture.

Especially as this concept makes the Breen more Federation-esque than you might expect, but in a different way. Seeing a "true believer" of the Breen way of life could have really expanded our understanding of their society. The non-dissident Breen are filled with hate for the Federation, but imagine them as more rueful over the Federation's misguided attempts at "equality." Also you might argue that Breen culture would appeal to Julian Bashir; one of Julian's throughlines in the novel (about which I'll say more in a moment) is that Sarina is a rare person who he feels like he fits with. Thus it seems to me there's potential in a Breen-style society for Julian, where one is judged on accomplishments, not background, as was true for Bashir up until he was revealed as genetically engineered. Would the "masking" of the Breen be a release for someone like him? I hope that future Destiny-era novels do more with the Breen culture Mack set up here, because it's a great idea with a lot of potential.

Finally, the character throughline of Julian didn't work for me. The narrative keeps telling us he's in love with Sarina, but it's not really shown. I felt like there was a missed opportunity in the action scenes to show Julian and Sarina as matched and compatible, as the only people able to keep up with each other, which would sell the reader on what Julian keeps saying about how Sarina is the only person operating on his level. Instead it seems like Julian just follows Sarina around and acts aghast at her decisions a lot, interrupted by occasional scenes where they flirt and/or have sex. Having them be on the same page for most of the novel would also make Sarina's decision to abandon the Breen dissidents more shocking; as it is, Julian comes across as naïve for being surprised by it given Sarina's attitudes throughout the novel. The novel is clearly setting up a long-term fall of some sort for Julian, though, and I'm interested in seeing where things go from here.

So, overall I would say this was a highly enjoyable thriller-- but it felt like it could have been a highly enjoyable thriller and an exploration of an alien culture and a stronger exploration of Julian Bashir himself.

Continuity Notes:

• It turns out Ro Laren is in command of Deep Space 9 now, which seems to have potential. I wonder how it will be handled going forward.

Other Notes:

• I didn't really care for the scene of Ezri and Julian arguing. Seemed improbably immature, especially when Julian storms off.
• This book also highlights a problem in the Destiny era that dates back to A Time for War, A Time for Peace and Articles of the Federation: I really do think 24th-century Federation politics were better left off screen most of the time. They're just so mundane and contemporary. On the other hand, I do like President Bacco and love Esperanza Piñiero, so who knows.

Review: Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor

Trade paperback, 208 pages
Published 2018
Borrowed from my wife
Read November 2018

Binti: The Night Masquerade
by Nnedi Okorafor

The first two Binti books didn't do a ton for me, but there seemed little reason not to read the third given it's only 200 pages and my wife already owned it. I actually think this was my least favorite Binti book yet, with the most muddled emotional throughline, an overly meandering plot, and too much happenstance. If you described these books to me, I would anticipate loving them, but for whatever reason, they just failed to grab me. Learning to appreciate diversity both in the world and in the self at space school seems like a great premise, but the books never adequately sell their protagonist. I do think it was a mistake to not have a book about Binti actually at space school; her return to school here rings hollow because we've never actually seen her there! There should have been a story between Binti and Home, and then Home and The Night Masquerade should have been a single, more focused book.

Oh my!

This happened to me some time ago, but back then I didn't blog about actual life events a whole lot; I recounted the story to someone a couple weeks ago, and it seems worth recounting here for posterity.

Back in 2014, when I was still a graduate student at UConn, George Takei was announced as coming to campus.

Of course, like any Star Trek fan I have an appreciation for George Takei. Captain Sulu, "oh my!", and so on. But I have a particular appreciation for George Takei because mine and Michael's first Star Trek book was Myriad Universe: The Tears of Eridanus. Set in an alternate reality where the Andorians dominate the Federation instead of humanity, it focuses on Captain Hikaru Sulu, captain of the largely Andorian crew of the Kumari, sent on a rescue mission to save his daughter on a desert planet. I wrote the Hikaru chapters, and I really enjoyed writing them. I think this Sulu is fundamentally the same as the Prime universe Sulu: a fundamentally inquisitive, personable man capable of steel when the situation calls for. I drew on how Sulu was an astrophysicist in the second pilot to make him a scientist, here struggling in the more militaristic environment of this universe.

Takei was appearing, I think, as part of his promotion of Allegiance, his musical that would debut on Broadway about a year later; the talk was co-sponsored by the Asian-American Studies Institute, the director of whom was on English faculty, and I knew, just knew that there had to be a dinner. There's always a dinner in academia.

I wanted in on that dinner.

After much hemming and hawing and I finally decided I would approach the professor, who I had taken one class with, and who was (I thought) friendly enough with me. I begged her to let me in somehow.

Thankfully, she acceded, with the condition that I would have to earn my keep by helping her. She was on crutches, so I would be her dogsbody, transporting her to and from the event, and doing any needed fetching and carrying. Of course I agreed.

The dinner wasn't one of those things where it's a speaker and six university types at the local Chinese place; it was a whole room of tables, with UConn catering. I was not at George Takei's table-- such an honor was reserved for the UConn president and provost and their like. (The provost, an Asian-American nerd himself, was the most human I ever saw him.) I had a copy of Tears with me, which I had made out to him, and I had wanted to give it to him at the dinner, but the whole time he was chatting up a storm and I couldn't work up the nerve to interrupt. He was doing a signing after his talk, so I figured I just give it to him then.

(Incidentally, the whole of UConn's Undergraduate Student Government executive was there, apparently having been invited as a matter of course. Was such courtesy extended to the Graduate Student Senate executive, of which I was then a member? At UConn in 2014, you don't even have to ask. I did get to chat with the president briefly... she failed to recognize me in any way shape or form even though we had had several interactions over the past couple years. Say what you will about our ruthless provost, but he knew to smile as he slipped in the knife.)

After his talk, I stood in the autograph line. This turned out to be quite long and I was quite a ways toward the end. Eventually it was declared that beyond a certain point no one was going to get to talk to him. Thankfully, the woman managing this was someone I had sat next to and explained my backstory to during dinner, so she let me stay in line. As the very last person in line, I was able to present George Takei with my autograph, telling him I had written a novel of Captain Sulu. He graciously accepted it and said some kind words, I think.

And that was it! I sometimes wonder what happened to that book. I doubt he read it. I read somewhere that some celebrities auction off stuff fans give them and donate the money to charity. Has some random fan gotten a copy of Tears of Eridanus with my inscription to George Takei? Or is the book in a pride of place on his bookshelf, as THE definitive Sulu novel?

#646: What famous person would you like to visit your school?

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Doctor Antomarchi, Psychiatrist (The Rose and the Key, 1871)

Hardcover, 395 pages
Published 2007 (originally 1871)
Borrowed from the library
Read February 2019

The Rose and the Key by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

"You can't explain, or deny it—I am to infer that," persisted Antomarchi; "you can't."
     "I can't—can I?—I can't—oh! what is it?—I feel so strangely." She shook her ears as if a fly was humming at them, and lifted her pretty fingers towards her temple vaguely. (344-45)

This incredibly dull novel focuses on a young woman who is wrongfully committed to a mental asylum (as the Victorians were always worried about); I read it as part of my project on Victorian scientists, curious about Doctor Antomarchi, the overseer of the asylum. Antomarchi might write some of the best papers in scientific journals (179), but he doesn't do much science-y stuff on the page. Mostly he's a malevolent mesmerist, as in the above passage, where he won't let our young hero say that she's not really suicidal, thanks to the malign power of his gaze. The actual asylum part is interesting, but it's just the last hundred pages or so in a four-hundred-page novel. Nothing that interesting happens prior to that; just people dancing and arguing. Not worth it at all.

(The introduction to my Valancourt edition is weird, spending dozens of pages telling you about Irish political history before it even gets to the novel. Establish a context for me to care before you begin going on about this! I tuned out long before she made any kind of claims about why knowing Irish political history would enhance my interpretation of the novel.)

Review: Hornblower: Beat to Quarters by C. S. Forester

Trade paperback, 324 pages
Published 1966 (originally 1937)
Acquired May 2007 
Previously read March 2008 
Reread January 2019

Beat to Quarters by C. S. Forester

1808
I originally read the Horatio Hornblower novels about a decade ago now, but since I didn't own the last three novels at the time, I didn't finish the series. Now I've sat down to read those last three, but I decided I ought to reread the first several. Only, last time I read them in internal chronological order, so to switch it up, this time I decided to do publication order.

Thus we start here, with what is certainly the best of the Hornblower novels, and is probably a better entry point than the first book chronologically if you're a Hornblower novice. (If you've already seen the tv show, though, go ahead and start with Mr. Midshipman Hornblower.) Beat to Quarters is an astounding achievement in naval fiction. Most of the novels are good, but this one is something else. It's taut, focused, and tense. You completely inhabit the world and the way of thinking of the Royal Navy. You don't know what a lot of the words mean, but you love it anyway, because they feel true. It's a harsh world, but it's another world, and it's hard to judge by our own standards. I suspect there are a lot of sf fans who are also Hornblower fans, because they scratch very similar itches: the depiction of an alternate world related to our own, but also a focus on intellect and cleverness. Hornblower is a problem-solver like one of those Golden Age sf heroes.

The book is very well constructed. Hornblower is sent to make overtures of alliance to El Supremo, a Spanish rebel on the Pacific coast of South America, because Spain is ally to Bonaparte. He captures with ease a Spanish ship of the line and turns it over to El Supremo-- and then when he goes to report in to the local British authorities, learns that before he had even done this, Spain had broken off its alliance with France, and is now allied with Britain. And so he has to go back to sea to capture the ship back from El Supremo. It's a beautifully done reversal; when Hornblower captures the Natividad so easily you almost think the author has rigged things in his favor, but recapturing it is a much more difficult prospect. The reversal is simultaneously sort of tragic and hilarious. The final battle with Natividad is amazing, gripping; it goes on for chapters but never gets old. You feel every gust of wind, every broadside, as the crew of the Lydia must fight to reclaim the Natividad with all they've got. A lot of the Hornblower novels are good, and they're all worth your time, but Forester perfected the character here, to be honest.

In my original review, I wrote:

The sixth Hornblower book chronologically, this was actually the first written, which results in some rather bizarre discontinuities as you might expect. Oh, bits of Hornblower's history don't match up-- he's probably never served with Bush before, and Bush certainly wasn't first mate on his first command as depicted in Hornblower and the Hotspur-- but Hornblower's character is a little off as well. This man's need for emotional detachment comes across as almost insane at times, though the death of Hornblower's children at the end of the previous installment sort of explains that. If you squint a bit. [...] Surprisingly, the romance with Lady Barbara was even almost palatable here, thanks to our ability to get Hornblower's inner thoughts regarding it. (I think it would be better in writing order, where we wouldn't have had the opportunity to meet Maria first.)

Indeed, if you read it in publication sequence, it's clear that Bush hasn't served with Hornblower before. Part of the trajectory of the novel is Bush coming to like and respect this odd captain. (And, somewhere by the end of the second book, you realize Hornblower has come to like and respect Bush in his own way.) You don't find Hornblower's character to be off-- because this is Hornblower's character. Everything else was a later imposition. Hornblower might be almost insane, but Beat to Quarters makes it clear that such detachment is required to be successful on a mission like this, the sole outpost of British authority on the far side of the world. I was right about the romance with Lady Barbara; with Maria but an intellectual abstraction, I could enjoy the Hornblower/Barbara romance, though Hornblower's infidelity is the one thing I never quite came to terms with. (I'll discuss that more in my reviews of the later books.)

One thing I noticed I hadn't the first time around is the narrator. It's a close third-person perspective, but not a limited one, as the narrator occasionally tells us things that other characters are thinking, or that Hornblower doesn't realize about his own self. The narrator is clearly from the time of publication, as he occasionally breaks in with acknowledged anachronisms (like, he says the word "globetrotter" didn't exist yet, but if it did, it would be how Hornblower would think of Lady Barbara), something that stuck out to me because as far as I noticed, Forester never used such a device in the rest of the series.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock

Mass market paperback, 498 pages
Published 2011
Acquired September 2012
Read November 2017

Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock

by Christopher L. Bennett

2381-82 (Stardate 58188.4 (a Tuesday) to 59155.0 (a Friday)), plus myriad other time periods too copious to mention
These days, the way New Frontier was populated with popular Next Generation guest stars in order to establish its legitimacy as a literary spin-off of the screen franchise seems positively naïve: here we have a novel based around two characters whose total screentime can be collected in a four-minute video. I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical going in, but Department of Temporal Investigations turned out to be a fun premise. The joy of it is in the way that Bennett approaches the DTI as a long-running cop show, about well-meaning but tired civil servants just trying to do their best in a universe that doesn't appreciate them.

It's the small details that make the book work: I liked the joke about how DTI agents are tired of time jokes (the one in the opening chapter was delightful); I liked how uptime temporal agents are higher authorities, basically like when the FBI turns up in a police procedural; I liked the idea that after major disasters, the DTI has more work both because of people trying to change history and because of tourists/researchers coming back to see it; I liked the little digest history of the DTI, where when Starfleet gets time travel, they're all "neat! let's explore time too! what could go wrong!" and the DTI is formed because the government is like, "You keep almost wiping out recorded history. STOP IT." I liked the portrayal of Dulmur and Lucsly. Bennett stated his intention was to turn their very colorlessness into an asset, and the book succeeded in this. I liked both of their fervent devotion to the job, and the sly humor of Lucsly, especially his final line in the penultimate chapter.

The book's strongest parts are its beginning and its ending. The opening chapter, featuring an agent who's snapped after a rough mission in the wake of Star Trek: Destiny is good fun; I loved both his rant ("Kill her, don't kill her, none of this makes a difference to the multiverse.") and Lucsly's putdown of it ("stop abusing temporal physics as an excuse to dodge responsibility for your own choices!"). The whole first chapter leads like the pilot episode of DTI tv show, because it goes straight from this (obviously the opening teaser) into a quick mystery about passenger transport that traveled through time, which has tv-style cutting between suspect interrogations. The whole thing culminates in the induction of a new member of the DTI, a potential viewpoint character. It was fun and entertaining.

Unfortunately, the whole book is not like that. It soon settles into a monotonous format of alternating present-day cases of the DTI in 2381 to 2382 with flashbacks that slowly ascend from 2364 to 2378. None of these cases are as good as the first one, which could stand on its own as a little story-- most of the flashback cases follow the format of "DTI turns up the aftereffects of a Next Generation episode; exposition is delivered to massage the details into the novel's Unified Theory of Star Trek Time Travel." It's definitely small world, and none of them are as zippily written as the introduction, sometimes getting quite belabored in their explaining of temporal theory, Star Trek continuity, or both. It's formulaic and there's not enough at stake in most of them to be interesting. Some are still entertaining, though (I liked the bit where Janeway escapes temporal justice and Lucsly quits the force), and soon a narrative begins to emerge, of the twenty-fourth century's participation in the Temporal Cold War from Enterprise.

I'm not entirely sure what I think about the novel's engagement with this. It works okay on the novel's own terms; the book lays clues about the identity of Enterprise's so called "Future Guy" in each of the flashbacks, and eventually that information pays off. But if you handed a fervent Enterprise fan this book so that they could finally get the answers Enterprise itself never yielded, I don't think they'd be satisfied, as there's absolutely no hints from Enterprise that really pay off here. The true identity and motive of "Future Guy" pay off Watching the Clock itself, not Enterprise. Plus, of course, no Enterprise characters are present to have anything to do with the comeuppance of their long-time nemesis. Maybe they should have plucked Archer out of time to punch him on the jaw or something? But it's as if a long-running mystery in the Father Brown stories was unexpectedly resolved in a Sherlock Holmes story. It jars narratively.

The ending is the other good part; the DTI, some Next Generation characters, the 29th-century Starfleet guys from "Relativity," the 31st-century temporal agents from Enterprise, and many more characters end up in snarled, tangled, temporal mess that was just completely ridiculous in a good way, taking all the goofy possibilities of Star Trek time travel and piling them atop each other to joyous excess. I didn't follow any of it (and I usually have a good head for these things), but I loved reading it. It's like Steven Moffat turned up to eleven.

Also the viewpoint newbie character gets shunted off into her own side story, which completely failed to engage me. The Axis of Time seems like a potentially interesting Big Dumb Object, but the story told with it was completely dull; I couldn't bring myself to care about cross-time artifact smuggling, or super sexy mind control space ladies.

So, a set-up that's more fun in theory than practice, but hopefully that bodes well for future installments of DTI-- I know the third installment onward are novellas, which seems like it would lend itself toward what I liked about the first chapter.

Continuity Notes:

• You could write a list of bullet points for this novel as long as the novel itself; of course, Bennett already has.
• That said, I caught a reference to the notorious Killing Time that he didn't annotate. On p. 205, Lucsly's Romulan counterpart kind of admits that the Romulans may have tried to eliminate the Federation from history "in some... other reality, now rendered irrelevant." (Though Bennett himself said it was less a specific reference to Killing Time and more a general reference to tie-ins about Romulans messing with history.)
• The anecdote about the ringship Enterprise, though, was a particularly belabored continuity fix in a novel full of them. And I'm not even sure the anecdote makes much sense.

Other Notes:

• Like S.C.E. / Corps of Engineers before it, Department of Temporal Investigations has a clunky and un-sexy subtitle. I maintain S.C.E. should have just been called Star Trek: Miracle Workers, but it's less obvious to me what Department of Temporal Investigations could have been called instead. Time Cops? Time Patrol? Time Masters?
• I did feel at times that no female character could turn up without having their attractiveness ranked; this culminates in a scene where Dina Elfiki walks past Dulmur and Lucsly while wearing a holo-disguise, and they exchange dialogue that amounts to, "Not even a hologram can disguise dat ass." (Elfiki is apparently modeled on Sarah Shahi.) On the other hand, I think the attractiveness of exactly one male character is commented on, and he's a Deltan sex god. Who says you need visuals to have male gaze?
• I was amused to note that even in the twenty-fourth century, ALOE is a common crossword puzzle filler word. (It's got three vowels!)
  
• I think this is the first Star Trek novel to include an allusion to pubic hair.