“City of Ashes” by Cassandra Clare

So, I realized recently that I have a terrible track record when it comes to talking about book series. I always have the best intentions, I start off with the first one, promise to talk about the others and then I forget or get distracted by something shiny and then never come back to it. I’m gonna try to be better. So, in the spirit of that, here is my considered opinion of the second book in the Mortal Instruments series- it’s awesome. This should come as no surprise.
So, it picks up not long after the first book ends and everyone is still trying to come to grips with the fact that Valentine, not- Voldemort, has returned and Clary and Jace are trying to cope with the fact that they are brother and sister, which I cannot stress enough isn’t true, but they don’t know that yet. So, they’re still Luke-and-Leia-ing it up, which honestly is really sad. Like, I enjoy a good romance as much as the next girl, maybe more, but this is still just kinda sad. And weird. Definitely weird. Because, I mean, what are you supposed to say? “Oh I wish they could be together”? “Those siblings would be such a cute couple”? Because at this point the reader isn’t supposed to know it either. I just cheated and peeked at a later book. I’m really not sure the author thought this thing all the way through, to be honest.
Anyhow, so the whole Shadowhunter world is in chaos as everyone tries to figure out what Valentine will do next, and what he does next is kill a bunch of people, rather predictably, to be honest. But still, it all is very cool and fairly cinematic the way it is written, it’s very easy to imagine it and the way it will look on screen, whenever it is the second movie comes out. The part on the boat in particular is very, very cool and how Magnus spells Luke’s truck so that it can just drive across the water? Awesome. I want my car to be able to do that. And how Clary uses that rune to completely destroy the boat? Girlfriend packs a mean punch. Oh, yeah, uh, in case you haven’t read the books, or don’t intend to, there are these runes that the Shadowhunters can draw, mostly on themselves, for things like healing, balance, strength or endurance and they’re basically magic. Well, Clary, because she’s awesome and the main character, can pack a whole lot more juice into your average rune than anyone else. She can also create new runes, which no one thought was possible before she started doing it. So, to destroy the boat, she carved the one for “open” into the hull and poured as much as she had into it. The boat was torn apart. Even the rivets flew out, that’s how big of a wallop she has. So, very cool. Makes up for the fact that she still doesn’t really do much fighting and in battle she mostly gets kidnapped and hit upside the head. But, that’s not really her fault, she wasn’t raised as a Shadowhunter, she didn’t even know she was one until recently, so she’s never been trained. You can’t blame someone for not knowing something they never thought they’d need to know.
And then there’s Simon, Clary’s best friend. This is where things get a bit tricky for me. See, this is where the series has me on shaky ground, as there is definite shades of Twilight in that particular storyline. That whole “love triangle, one of whom is her best friend and loves her deeply and faithfully from afar” thing. That is always super annoying. Especially since they’re following the Twilight tradition of the best friend being the one who loses out. Though, I will grant you, watching her genuinely try to be with him was a nice change of pace. You can’t really blame the poor girl- her mom is in a coma, the guy she’s in love with is apparently her brother, her home and everything she owns is destroyed, she’s found out her life is based on a lie and then her best friend leans over and kisses her. What’s she supposed to do? Shove him away? So she tries and it’s sweet and sad that she just can’t be that for him, that all she can think about and all she wants is Jace. And poor Jace, he just fell so hard and so fast. She’s the whole world for him and he can’t have her, and now she’s with this other guy. It just kills him. Honestly, it’s crazy how much he cares about her and worries about her- at one point he runs into the demon of fear, which kills by showing a person what they fear most in all the world. Apparently that much mind- bending terror, magically amplified no doubt, will kill a person pretty quickly. Anyway, what he sees when he sees the demon is Clary dying. Seriously, that is the thing that he is more afraid of than anything else in the world. Well, that and his father, since that’s what he sees the second time he runs into the demon.
Anyway, there’s a nice change of pace from that stupid trope when Simon breaks up with Clary, instead of the other way around. And there really aren’t any bad feelings, he just tells her that he knows it’s not working, he knows she doesn’t feel that way about him and that he would rather have what they’ve always had, a true friendship, than pretend at anything else. He would rather have that truth than a lie that would twist everything about them. So that was nice. Oh, and Simon is turned into a vampire, which I’m not sure how I feel about. I mean, cool, he’s now fully a part of that world, yay awesome, but I’m not a huge fan of vampires. And I don’t really understand those who are. So… neutral. Neutral I suppose.
As I said, I think this book was awesome and it ends on a little bit of a cliffhanger, as someone announces to Clary that they know how to get her mother out of her magically induced coma, so that leads quite nicely into the third book.

“Dr. Who”!

So I just recently, despite the fact that it’s been on my radar for years, started watching “Dr. Who”, and I know this is a source of serious argument and personal taste, but I love Matt Smith as the The Doctor so much. He is my absolute favorite. I mean, David Tenant and Christopher Eccleston are awesome too, but I freaking love Matt Smith. He has that perfect combination of ancient wisdom and nine- year old on a sugar rush, with a dash of bad ass pacifist warrior (stranger combination of words I have never typed). So I decided to share some of my favorite moments from The Doctor, cuz I like sharing the things that I love.

That’s my favorite episode!

Soo…. I guess what I’m saying here is- I love Matt Smith, though only as The Doctor, don’t know him otherwise, and I want to marry him and have his babies. Matt Smith, if you’re reading this for some reason, sorry if that came across as creepy.

Oh! And I have two weird coincidence stories for you, in case you care. Okay, so a couple weeks ago, when I first started watching “Doctor Who”, someone finally answered my question on the “Libraries in Movies” post I did a while back, where it was obviously a screenshot, but I had no idea from what. Hang on-

That, it was that. Anyway, so someone finally let me know what it was from, which was “The Silence in the Library” from Season 5. Well, again, this was maybe a week after I started watching the show, who knows how long since I had posted it to begin with, and then the next day I saw that episode on BBC America. It was too weird.

Also, today I was at work, telling my coworker about this show, since I was thinking about it and I can be a tad bit obsessive and while I was telling him about it I was making someone’s drink and they got all excited because it turns out they’re a big Who- fan too. They were even wearing a Bad Wolf Corporation t- shirt at the time. It’s freaking weird how this keeps happening 🙂

“City Of Bones” by Cassandra Clare

So I’m gonna be honest- I tore through this series like I haven’t in a while. I very quickly developed a fangirl reaction to not only this series but the trailers for the movie that comes out in August, which btw looks epic. But, first things first, let’s talk about “City of Bones”.
So, it’s another of those “there’s a whole other world beneath our noses” books, which isn’t quite played out, but I feel like it might be getting close to it. I mean, I know it’s a classic way to enter a brand new world, you can’t beat it, it’s the perfect way to introduce the audience to this new world and all it’s weird rules and creatures. But still, do you know how many times I’ve read it? I can’t tell you, because I’ve lost track. But that little quibble aside, and one other that I’ll get to in a minute, I really loved this book. Clary was awesome and brave, and not in the usual way you’d expect in a book about demon- hunting. She wasn’t much for flying sidekicks or whatever, and wouldn’t be for several books, but she’s a fighter and she refused to give up. Her mom was missing, her world was in chaos and she was in danger and there was very little she could do about it, but she didn’t give up and she didn’t even consider giving up. She just kept fighting and trying to protect the people that were important to her.

The whole Shadowhunter thing is pretty cool too. Apparently they’re the Nephilim, the offspring of humans and angels, a thing that I first heard of in an X- Files episode years and years ago. (You can’t say my nerd pedigree isn’t spotless, heh- heh.) There’s also something about Seraphim blades and stuff that I’m honestly a bit fuzzy on because they have to, like, name the Seraphim blade before they can use and that’s never really explained. Does each name confer a certain power on each blade? Are they power levels? Why? How? It’s never explained, and I would really like an explanation. But other than that, I quite liked the world she made. It seems pretty realistic and well- crafted.

The weird thing about these books, among the other thing that I still haven’t mentioned, is that there’s this guy, the bad guy, Valentine, which is a stupid ass name for a bad guy, everything else aside (why name you’re villian after the holiday for love?), and he is basically Voldemort. Seriously, before anyone who’s read these books argues with me, think about it- he’s all about how his hidden kind of human is the best, mundanes/ muggles are terrible, and those with power are the very best. There’s even this thing he says about how the Downworlders, vampires, werewolves and warlocks, aren’t as good as the Shadowhunters because they’re tainted, have dirty blood, mudbloods if you will. It’s crazytown. Did she realize she was doing it when she did it? But that’s not even the weirdest part. The weirdest part is that all of the adults in the book are ex- members of his little gang of not- Deatheaters, called the Circle. And pretty much all of the main characters are the children of ex- Circle members. Not only that, but- spoilers- Clary is the biological daughter of Valentine, not- Voldemort himself. Can you imagine if that had popped up in Harry Potter? It certainly would have livened things up a bit, wouldn’t it?

Anyway, then there’s Jace, the love interest, and he is bad- freaking- ass. Like, seriously, he is a badass. He is an ass- kicker of the first order, great warrior, great demon hunter. Not only that, but the boy is really funny. These are character traits that I really look for in a fictional man. You can’t lose with a funny ass- kicker. Especially when you have one that is so clearly gone over the heroine. It’s really, really sweet. I loved their romance and just watching those two. They are very, very cute together and for once I wasn’t too irritated by the obvious setting up of a love triangle/ forbidden love thing, mostly because of how she did it, which was… weird. And not in a good way, weird. Yeah, this is the thing I was going to get to, spoilers by the way, see the thing is, is that at the end of the book, there’s this big confrontation with Valentine and he tells Clary and Jace, after they have spent the entire book falling in love with each other, that they are brother and sister. That Clary’s older brother did not in fact die all those years ago, like Clary’s mother thought, right before her mother left Valentine forever, barely two months pregnant with Clary. That her brother had survived the fire and that they, Clary and Jace, are in fact, full blooded brother and sister. So, yeah. She went to a weird place. Now, I want it fully understood, that it is not in fact true. Sorry, spoilers. I mean, I knew that ahead of time, because I picked up the first book after browsing through a display of all the ones that have come out already, including the new one that talks about Jace and Clary’s brother Sebastian, so I knew it wasn’t true, that it was all a horrible lie from her horrible father, but still. Yech. Why would she go there? Seriously. Wha- why? I mean, I get the point. Beyond eventually introducing her real brother later on and it also proves what a dick her father is, because he could see they loved each other, he even commented on it, there’s the whole “doomed romance” thing, which is like half the point of the book I think. And this way you don’t have to question either one’s character or strength, or the strength of their love, but still. Couldn’t she have found a less… icky way? The whole thing is weird. But again, it’s all a horrible lie from her dick of a father. So, there’s that.

Anyway, bizarre storytelling choice aside, and how they’ll spin that in the movie I have no freaking clue, it was a really, really good book. I seriously did tear my way through the entire series in no time flat. It was even one of those that, if I had to walk away I spent the entire time thinking about it. One of those where you’re like “You don’t understand! There’s this book!” anytime someone wants to talk to you. It’s one of those. So, really, I can’t recommend it enough and I will totally be in line to see it opening day when the movie finally comes out.

P.S. I figured out how to embed videos! Finally! Yay!

Awesome Pictures

“Mr. Real” by Carolyn Crane

Okay, so I recently sort of discovered a new author, Carolyn Crane. I say “sort of” because of this book. It was… to say “bad” would be a misnomer. “Unreadable” comes closer. I literally could not read this book. It was too stupid. I originally thought, Hey, I like her other books, the Disillusionist Trilogy, I’ll probably like this one. Sure, the premise is retarded but it sounds retarded in a fun way. Wrong! It was just straight up retarded. Like, horrifyingly bad.

So, the premise is that the main character, Alix (my first hint that it was a bad book. Who spells that with an i?) inherits a house and a bunch of other stuff from her cooky, old aunt when she dies. I say “cooky” because it turns out the lady was a witch, like an actual magic using witch, and not one of the wiccan types who are mostly about being in balance with nature, but who used actual magic and, get this, managed to transfer that magic to a computer somehow. So that anything you click on, using a computer that has that code in it, will magically appear a day later on your front porch. Like I said, the premise sounded really, really stupid, but whatever I was willing to roll with it. Where she really lost me was the heroine, Alix. With an i. Instead of treating this ludicrous macguffin with kid gloves and a healthy dose of suspicion, since it’s a magical freaking computer and last I checked, magic comes with a price, she decides to use it to go shopping. She “orders” a supposedly great outfit, though based on the description you couldn’t pay me to wear it, and an insanely expensive necklace before it comes to her- she should use it to order a man! And not just any man, no no. She should use it to order a tv commercial character who is played by a guy that she met years ago, for a few weeks that she is somehow still half in love with. No, it didn’t make sense to me either. Any of it. Nothing in that previous sentence made any sense to me, but whatever because she goes for it.

The explanation why she should do such a thing is really, really stupid too. It’s not that she’s smart and just did a dumb thing, or just got caught up in the whole, “Hey, I can have whatever I want!” after years of poverty or whatever. No, no. She’s just that kind of person. She’s crazy, she’s wacky, isn’t that just so much fun! She randomly used magical objects that she doesn’t understand for completely selfish reasons! Isn’t she just so wacky and fun? Honestly, in any other book, she would be the first casualty. She’d be the smoking puddle of ooze on the floor that everyone looks at and goes “So now we know not to do that. Thank you, Alix with an i, for that object lesson.” Instead, no no. She’s just so crazy and fun, and so deeply misunderstood. What part of any of what she does make sense, or is in any way a good idea? None of it! Does the book care? No!

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really read the rest of it after that. I flipped around a lot, trying to see if it redeemed itself at some point and it most assuredly did not. The guy shows up and since he’s supposed to be some sort of secret agent in the commercials, he thinks he’s a secret agent there and he seriously wonders whether he should kill her, and then the guy she is inexplicably still half in love with after all this time, after minimal contact, I cannot stress enough how minimal the contact was, they never even met socially, shows up and stuff happens and… I don’t know. I think the fake guy goes crazy or something. There seemed to be some sort of standoff or something. Anyway, yeah, amazingly stupid. I’m actually really put off Carolyn Crane right now. Which is a shame because her Disillusionist Trilogy was actually really good. It had this superhero vibe that I seriously dug. But now I don’t even know if I can read her stuff again. It was that bad. I feel dumber for having read it. I spent actual money on this book. Like actual, factual money. And I ordered it online, so it had to be shipped to me. So that’s even more money and some poor package deliverer’s time. Oh god.

Terry Pratchett Quote

Okay, so if you’ve read my previous post you’ll know that I mentioned a Terry Pratchett idea that is mentioned several times in his books and can be boiled down simply to- “Be yourself. As hard as you can.” Well, I decided I might as well be thorough and tracked one down. It’s a bit lengthy, but I like it and I feel like it says pretty much everything that needs to be said. It’s from Good Omens, which was cowritten by him and Neil Gaiman.

“Then something very strange happened to (Mary)… She discovered, under layers of silliness and eagerness to please, Mary Hodges. She found it quite easy to interpret builders’ estimates and do VAT calculations. She’d got some books from the library, and found finance to be both interesting and uncomplicated. She’d stopped reading the kind of women’s magazine that talks about romance and knitting and started reading the kind of women’s magazine that talked about orgasms, but apart from making a mental note to have one if ever the occasion presented itself she dismissed them as only romance and knitting in a new form. So she’d started reading the kind of magazine that talked about mergers.

After much thought, she’d bought a small home computer from an amused and condescending young dealer in Norton. After a crowded weekend, she took it back. Not, as he thought when she walked back into the shop, to have a plug put on it, but because it didn’t have a 387 co-processor. That bit he understood- he was a dealer, after all,  and could understand quite long words- but after that the conversation rapidly went downhill from his point of view. Mary Hodges produced yet more magazines. most of them had the term “PC” somewhere in their title, and many of them had articles and reviews that she had circled carefully in red ink.

She read about New Women. She hadn’t ever realized that she was an Old Woman, but after some though she decided that titles like that were all one with the romance and the knitting and the orgasms, and the really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.”

Awesome Pictures

Okay, so I sort of collect pictures that I find on the internet. If I like it, if it makes me smile or laugh, then I save it. Obviously, considering how many pictures there are on the internet, I have a rapidly expanding file that is, at this moment 2,021 strong. I expect it to grow again and soon. So, needless to say, this has left me with a surplus of just awesome pictures- here are some of them. I will share later, perhaps in themes.

 

 

The “Hunter Kiss” series by Marjorie M. Liu

I have recently added Marjorie M. Liu to my list of favorite authors. I edged around her for years, noting her books in the store, occasionally picking one up but never reading one. They just seemed… not uninteresting but maybe the sort of thing that I wouldn’t really get into. It just didn’t really seem like my kind of thing. But, one day I decided, what the hell? What can it hurt to try? And, obviously, I have not regretted that decision. It also helped that I had read a short story of hers in an anthology, which if you’ll remember one of my earliest posts, is a great way to discover new authors. It’s also a great way to lose valuable brain cells and six or so dollars of your hard earned money, but you roll the dice. Anyway, so I tried Liu out and, amazingly, actually picked up her first book, purely by accident. What are the odds? But that’s not the focus of this, because that’s part of a different series. Here I am talking about her Hunter Kiss series, which starts with a short story and thus far has four books in it. It’s really, really cool. I think I know where she’s going with it, but I cannot imagine how she’ll manage it and that’s always a plus in a series. If you see every twist and turn coming a mile away, what’s the point? Where’s the fun? Where’s the joy, the experience of seeing it all through the character’s eyes as it happens?

Okay, so- Hunter Kiss. Let’s start with this- the world as we know it, is not really the world.  A lot of books start that way and it’s a pretty classic way to start. The world we know is not all there is to know and the author draws back the curtain to include us in this special new view of reality. So far, nothing new in that. And when this curtain is drawn back, it is revealed that demons are real. Also, so far nothing new. Things as far reaching as Buffy the Vampire Slayer have used that. But this one is a bit different, and I’ll tell you why. The person, the one person capable of defending us from the demon hordes is Maxine Kiss, the last Hunter, the last Warden of a dying prison. That prison is here, that prison is Earth. It turns out, humans are so vulnerable to demons, so deeply incapable of defending themselves against them, that our world was turned into a prison just to protect us. And beyond the boundary of our dimension, our world, there are rings of other prisons, holding the demons, with the most harmless closest to us. The “most harmless” being the ones who only possess us, force us to do terrible things and feed off of our pain, just to give you a sense of perspective here. Not that this series is one of those that lovingly dwells on the horror, like some do. Mostly it focuses on Maxine as she tries to protect our world, us, from these creatures as the cracks in the prison walls get larger and start to come crumbling down. She comes from a ten- thousand year old line of hunters, blood bound to five demons who help them, protect them, and fight for them. During the day, these demons live on her skin as tattoos, making her virtually immortal. Like, literally, immortal. You could drop an atomic bomb on her head, bury her alive, set her on fire, push her in front of a bus, and nothing would happen. These are not examples I pulled out of thin air, btw, these are all things that have either happened to her or to women in her bloodline. And when night falls, the demons are free and fight for her. It’s an apocalyptic story, obviously, but it’s also a story of heroics and sacrifice, as well as a love story because obviously she has a love interest and he is also very, very cool and totally worthy to stand by her side.

I do wish that Liu had more of a knack for making things seem epic, but I get that that is a rare gift, I’ve really only read a few authors who could truly pull that off, so I’m trying not to dwell on it too much although it would add so much to the story if she could get just a little of that. As it is, it feels very intimate, obviously, and there’s the sense of one small person against overwhelming odds and you do wonder how she’ll do it, since Maxine is not the bloodthirsty warrior type, and you do truly love all the characters. I just wish that it had more of that epic struggle, grand scale thing going, where you’re reading it going “Holy crap, this is unbelievable” and it just takes your breath away. That said, I still really love this series, and totally recommend it to any and all who are into those kinds of books. I promise, there is no Mary- Sue-ing, a la Laurell K. Hamilton for whom there is just no excuse. Ahem, unless you like Laurell K. Hamilton, in which case I said nothing.

Libraries in Movies

This is part of my Awesome Libraries series, but these are all from movies. I thought it would be fun to include them.

I had to look pretty closely, but I’m pretty sure this is from “Star Wars”, “Clone Wars” if memory serves.

“Beauty and the Beast.” You had to know this one was coming. It was every little nerd girl’s dream.

This one is obviously a screenshot but hell if I know what movie it’s from. If anyone knows, please tell me in the comments, I would appreciate it.

This is from “Fullmetal Alchemist”, a badass anime from a few years ago. Not sure if it ever appeared in the series, but this kind of scene had to have happened at one point or another, whether they showed it or not.

I’m not sure if this is a screenshot or just a photo, but whatever. It’s cool either way.

Okay, not technically a movie scene, but it’s movie themed and it is a library, soo… yeah, I’m calling it good.

This isn’t any one movie or book specifically but I liked it and it sort of fit, so there you go.

Oh and I found this too. It was too awesome not to share.

“The Long Earth” by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett

This book caught me by surprise, mostly because I had no idea it was coming out. Which is kind of unusual, since I normally keep a pretty close watch on my favorite authors, but somehow this one slipped by me. Anyway, I liked this book, even though it was rather odd. And I don’t mean odd like most of Terry Pratchett’s books, where it’s weird but completely awesome and hilarious. I mean, it was awesome and funny in parts, but it was not like his other books. This one was apparently written because he and Stephen Baxter had an idea and decided to write about it. You know the kind of book I’m talking about. The kind where it’s a great concept, and the author talks at length, and with great eloquence, about that concept for several hundred pages before all of a sudden apparently realizing that they need to have a plot or a conflict in their book, which is when they toss in a sudden kidnapping or whatever, that is very quickly resolved and then all of a sudden the book ends. I have never encountered Terry Pratchett doing that before. I’m not sure how to feel about that. Normally I ding an author for that kind of behavior, but I have long since canonized Terry Pratchett so I don’t think I can do that. He is my very favorite author, ever. This is coming from someone who can never pick a single favorite anything, so the fact that he is my single favorite author should tell you everything you need to know. This book though… this book was different.

Okay, so- the long Earth. The concept with that is basically the multiverse, which, if you haven’t heard of it, is the idea that for every decision you make, or don’t make, every thing you do, or don’t do, somewhere out there there is a version of you that did the opposite. That, in some parallel universe, there is version of you that is living every single possible life that there is. Which is kind of a nice thought, really. Somewhere, somehow, everything has happened, and there are no true missed opportunities. Anyway, well this book plays with that idea. Basically, there are infinite earths and people have figured out how to go to them. You have the original earth, the Datum Earth in the book (datum is a reference point for measurements, like if you were saying “blank miles from Chicago”, Chicago would be the datum) and from there you can East or West, left or right, even though technically those directions mean nothing, it’s just a way to understand it. And from there, they apparently stretch on to infinity, or as near as makes no difference. And the further out, the stranger they can get. In one, the dinosaurs never went extinct. In several others, there’s an Ice Age going on. In another, there is no moon. It goes on and on. Evolution going in all different directions, creatures that we can only imagine, in fact every creature you can possibly imagine exists somewhere on the long Earth. And part of the reason it’s called “long” is that how you get there is by stepping. Most people use this little technological gizmo to get them there, but mostly that’s for show. You don’t actually need it to get there, it just tricks your mind into figuring out how to do it, like showing it this door that wasn’t there before.

Anyway, and in all these other Earths, there are no other humans, or there weren’t until people started going there. Apparently we are a unique phenomenon to Datum Earth. There are other bipedal humanoids out there, some benign, some malignant, but none that are human human. Which means, basically, that there is this whole new world, infinite whole new worlds, for us to explore, to colonize, to harvest from. There is suddenly infinite resources, for everyone. Any man can have a gold mine, if he goes out far enough. Any man can have anything, if he wants it. And all of a sudden, gold has no value except for how pretty it looks. All of a sudden, all the things that we have spent all of human civilization building up, seem kind of empty. How can you have an economy when a huge part of that is based on you having a limited amount of something that other people value? What would happen to our culture, our civilization, when anyone can have anything, when a huge part of the way we work, the way we look at and act upon the world is based on the fact that there are only so many resources and we have to do our part to get it. What happens when we no longer need to farm, because there’s enough resources that we can be hunter- gatherers forever? I have to tell you, reading it, it feels a bit like the apocalypse. Not necessarily in a bad way, because lots of good things come out of it, but it is definitely the death of the old world, the old way of life, and the birth of the new. In the book, they never really tell you what year it is, or what year the plans for making a stepper appeared online, but they always tell you, whether in a flashback or not, how many years it’s been since the Step Day, the day when so many people unwittingly stepped out of our world, our universe. There’s a very good reason for that.

And, beyond that, there’s the fact that there’s a full fifth of humanity that cannot step, no matter what. They can be carried to another world, but it makes them violently ill. A full fifth of the world that cannot take part in this new world, this new age of exploration, can’t go to another world, can’t experience the world as it is without people, the unspoiled beauty, the endless possibilities, can’t reap the rewards of unlimited resources, nothing. Well, they can’t reap the rewards directly. A big part of the book is actually an expedition that is being undertaken to find the end, if there is one, and it’s being done on board an airship, which can travel world to world. No one else had figured out how to do that yet, and if it worked out then it would revolutionize trade and Datum Earth’s flagging economy would be revamped, not only revamped but take off like a rocket. However, these people don’t know that. All they know is that they can’t go there, they are apparently evolutionarily backwards and they have been left on what must feel like a dying world, a world with taxed resources and an economy in the toilet. Which, when they describe it like that, makes you cheerful as all get out, let me tell you. So of course they’re angry and of course they make groups and of course someone does something stupid.

By and large, the book is overwhelmingly in favor of a return to a simpler lifestyle, and they make some excellent points about it. How, with less crowding there would be less crime. I have no statistics to back that up, but it does sound about right. How things would be more fair, that the working poor and worse could get away from their lives. That they could just walk away into what is basically unspoiled paradise. How you can just walk away and start anew, anywhere you want, on a whim. It all sounds great but they did forget a few things which would make it a little less than great. If you’re a pioneer and you get into an accident, what happens? You end up crippled or dead. If you’re a pioneer woman and you’re giving birth and things go wrong, what happens? You die. If you’re a new mother and your baby won’t nurse, where do you get formula? Nowhere. Basically, they forgot about things like medical emergencies, childbirth and infants. Inconvenient little details like that. But other than that, yeah, I guess it would be better. I would sure miss my air conditioning though.

It’s a very interesting book and I couldn’t stop thinking about it while I read it and I haven’t had much success since I finished it, but I have to say, there’s not a whole lot of plot. There’s the expedition, and there’s the hate groups back home with their developing story, but other than that it’s a bunch of vignettes of what the authors think the world, so to speak, would be like if this happened. Like I said, it’s like they had an idea, wrote about that idea, and then tried to shoehorn a plot in afterwards. That being said, it was wonderful and wonderfully written and a fascinating concept. If for no other reason than that, I recommend it.