Strange Heritage: Thoughts from a Star Trek TOS Bingewatch!

My dad recently came to visit me, and one of the things I bought a while back but never actually went through was a Blu-Ray box set of Star Trek (the original series)! He's a big fan of the show, and so, when we weren't doing something else, we kicked back and watched some old Star Trek together.

We didn't watch the whole series, but my dad picked and chose episodes from the whole original run, starting with the pilot and going all the way through the end of the third season. All in all, we watched about 34 episodes, and then 6 more he watched while I was half-doing something else.

The original Star Trek series is a great example of a half-way point between older sci-fi pulps and modern pop sci-fi that focuses on longer plots and personal drama. It does a bit of both. It's very episodic, but there are a few little story elements that appear repeatedly and actually develop over the course of the show. Spock's character is a good example.

One thing I noticed was a strong degree of repetitiveness in the show (for better or worse). There were quite a few episodes that were pretty simple, along the lines of "monster hunts the crew," with a few of them fairly basic and one or two that were quite good. Lots of supercomputers running civilizations, usually with disastrous consequences. Plenty of plots about someone bad getting into Engineering (they need better locks or something!). Quite a few super-beings playing with the crew. Many ticking clocks where something must be done by some time or else the Enterprise must leave for some other mission. Also, a veritable greenhouse full of different plants that shoot gas, spores, or thorns. The Star Trek jelly lens for shots of women was a frequent guest in the episodes we watched, too.

I was surprised to find that two of the episodes we watched were originally written by Harlan Ellison and Robert Bloch. I actually had to do a double-take and make sure it was the same Bloch who wrote horror pulp stories, but it was!

We watched quite a few of the "meme" episodes: The Man Trap with Kirk's "handsome woman" comment; The Naked Time with fencing shirtless Sulu; Shore Leave, with the Alice in Wonderland references; Arena with the infamous Kirk-Gorn slowfight; The City on the Edge of Forever, in which "Edith Keeler must die;" and The Omega Glory, with the pseudo-Constitution and pseudo-Pledge of Allegiance.

I was a little surprised by what my dad chose to skip, too: We watched exactly zero Klingon episodes, and skipped The Trouble with Tribbles and I, Mudd, too.

Kirk was often a bit of a superman, and it was also funny to see how the Blu-Ray clarity made stunt doubles very obvious.

It was a fun experience, and it was interesting to watch (and in some cases, re-watch) some of these old examples of pop sci-fi from the '60s, that has been so influential for so long. Some people dismiss TOS as a relic of a bygone era, but there's something to be learned from its simplicity and episodic nature, and its long-term popularity. It also made me put a new value on The Next Generation, which I watched much more frequently as a kid, and the contrast between the two of them is something worth considering deeply. It's been a long time since I've seen any TNG, so maybe I'll have to look back at some of that, eventually!

A Satisfying Conclusion... for now! Review of Raymond Feist's Magician: Master

It's going to be impossible to review Magician: Master without spoiling a little bit of Magician: Apprentice, so if you're sensitive to spoilers, you may want to check out my review of the first book, and figure out whether or not you want to read it, and then come back here.

With that warning in place, here we go!

Magician: Master is the second book in Raymond Feist's first four-book Riftwar Saga, and it's even more closely connected to Apprentice than the two that follow (those would be Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon).

Tense, Realistic Sci-Fi: The Andromeda Strain!

This was a blast from the past... I read a lot of Michael Crichton's works back when I was in high school, but I really haven't read any of his stuff since then... over 20 years!

I recently picked up a copy of The Andromeda Strain and read it again... I can't believe this book came out in 1969! It seems newer than that to me.

Pursuit of a Decent Title: Missteps and Fails!

Normally I write an extended post that kind of explains the video so that you can get most of the value out of reading it.

This time, I'm just going to say that my incredulous reading of some of my ideas as I worked on a title for Pursuit of the Heliotrope is something mere writing would be unlikely to capture.

After I finished the book, I spent about two days fumbling over a title (despite all the thinking I had done while writing) and some of the goofy things I came up with are worth hearing about.

You can check out the book here, if you'd like:

on Amazon: https://a.co/d/csZVOO0

or elsewhere: https://books2read.com/u/bWaQQM

Made in the Edits: Lessons from My First Novel, part 3

Sometimes you actually have to finish something before you really understand the process. My first novel was a great example of this principle.

Some background: I wrote what I thought was a detailed outline and character description before I started on the first draft of Pursuit of the Heliotrope. I finished the first draft, and it just barely reached 50,000 words. And, to be honest, by the time I was working on the last third of the book, I was feeling pretty tired of it and definitely wasn't doing my best at that point. And I wasn't even really crunching to finish it! I just found it hard to maintain interest in writing the same thing for such a long period.

Action-packed Pulpy Origins: The Skylark of Space!

The Lensman series was a lot of fun, so I decided to pick up E.E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark series! This first book, Skylark of Space, was serialized all the way back in 1928, and, like many of the Lensman books, expanded later on for a standalone release in 1946.

Where Lensman started out as a pretty simple cops and robbers series, Skylark is even simpler:

Richard Seaton (our hero) discovers a new metal which enables rapid conversion of copper into energy and motion. While he's working with his wealthy friend Martin Crane (not the guy from Frasier) on this metal, rival amoral scientist DuQuesne is seeking to get rid of them and monopolize this miracle metal for himself.

After several failed plots to kill Seaton and Crane and steal the metal, DuQuesne ends up kidnapping Seaton's fiancée and running with her out into space.

The chase that ensues involves visiting several planets, the first of which is curiously reminiscent of what Smith would later call Eddore in the Lensman series, and the second of which forces Seaton and Crane to insert themselves into a war between two nations.

Thus, we get some minor intrigue and a hell of a lot of action.

As you probably expect, DuQuesne is thwarted in the end, but escapes to continue to be a thorn in our heroes' sides.

The book is a fun read, nothing too heavy. It's full of Smith's unique dialogue and slang, as well as a decent amount dedicated to his peculiar perspective on how to write romance. It's even pulpier than Triplanetary, which was pretty darn pulpy, and fun and engaging while not being deep. It doesn't ask a lot of questions.

The characters are relatively static with a mild to moderate case of superman syndrome, and the science aspects are fairly vague but occasionally interesting, such as Smith's detailing of different alien races and how they react to various wavelengths of light.

It's short and action-packed, and the sequel is, somewhat confusingly unless you've read this book, called Skylark Three. I'll have to give that one a look, sometime.

I read Skylark of Space here. You can also buy it on Amazon. 

A Gateway to Great Fantasy! Raymond E. Feist's Magician: Apprentice!

Gotta admit, I'm a pretty big fan of Raymond Feist. My first experience with his work was ironically something he was only partly involved in: the classic PC RPG Betrayal at Krondor. There was something fun and enjoyable about the world--fairly grounded, lots of little details, fun and funny characters, and lots of intrigue.

Imagine my surprise a few years later when I stumbled upon a book called Krondor: The Betrayal, which was his adaptation of the story used for the game that he wrote after the fact, as far as I understand. I grabbed it off the shelf and really enjoyed it. That got me interested in his earlier works, too.

So, this post is all about Feist's first novel, which was a massive tome called Magician in Europe, but for the U.S. market it got split into two volumes: Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master. I'll be talking about the first volume today.

This was Feist's first novel, and it was based on a world that he and his friends had created and fleshed out as a setting for their tabletop RPG sessions. Reviews at the time said its weakest point was its lack of originality, but I feel like that's missing the forest for the trees. Midkemia shares a lot of rough characteristics with classic sword and sorcery settings, but I think it offers a lot more.

For example, Feist's setting, especially in the earlier novels, is much lower-magic than most. This gives things a very grounded quality that makes even small stakes feel heavy. Feist's take on medieval-style politics is rich and nuanced and has a reasonable mixture of good and bad guys, with some nice philosophical hooks behind the good guys. The world has a believable mixture of light and dark, and practical and magical. We see large variations in culture, climate, and government over the course of just this book.

Magician: Apprentice tells the first part of the story of Pug, a young man who will become a very powerful force in later books. We get to see the first couple of years of the Riftwar, which I find fascinating. It's a hero's journey, but with enough unique bits that it feels fresh and alive.

Feist is great at juggling multiple story threads without rushing to get from one to another or to bring them together. Pug's story, that of a common-born orphan thrust by coincidence into the role of an unsuccessful apprentice, results in his eventual elevation to minor nobility by his Duke Borric and his entry into the war effort.

But his story, starting in Crydee, splits into three as you read further. We get a side story of Pug's foster brother, Tomas, and his interactions with the dwarves and the elves, and a fantastic tale full of intrigue as we follow Duke Borric's son Arutha on a series of political missions. These three threads split off from each other partway through the book and all of them develop in interesting ways.

There's a lot of mystery in this book.

Midkemian politics are one of my favorite aspects of the early Feist novels. He aims neither for an idealistic portrayal of a kingdom fighting an empire, nor a grim and pessimistic look at life under a noble caste. Borric has a strong sense of justice and obligation to the people, and so do his sons, sometimes to what many would call a fault. There are hints of a crisis looming on the horizon in this book, and the efforts of Arutha and his companions to cope with it are amazing to read.

There is no obvious "villain" on the Midkemian side, only some with different senses of where honor and allegiance should lie, and a king with an interesting, conflicting position.

There are several moving moments throughout the book. Without spoiling too much, we have the Choosing ceremony, a pledge of three friends, scenes that show the strangeness of war and honor, and more.

Feist has a good sense of comedic timing in this book, too. The three friends' pledge is a good example, but we have the dry humor of Martin and the elves, the bickering between Roland and Carline, and the humble irony of an old pirate captain.

Romance is present in the book but it is kept fairly tasteful and is not really the focus of the book.

All in all, this book was the beginning of the Riftwar Saga, a series of four books of which I've read three (really need to get a copy of Silverthorn one of these days), and enjoyed all of them. Feist organizes his books into "sagas" of usually four books, where each "saga" has a different set of main characters, with some overlap and appearances of characters from other books. I've probably read about ten or twelve of Feist's books at this point, and honestly my favorites are many of these older ones.

Later works have a tendency to raise the stakes in a way I find a little ridiculous, whereas these early books, sometimes the stakes are just one little frontier castle and a few hundred men, and I love how Feist handles these situations. Plus, the low-magic setting means that problem-solving is a thoughtful and detailed process, which I really enjoy.

Each Feist Saga has a different focus, too, so feel free to start at the beginning of any of them, but this is his first book and is an excellent starting point, no matter which of his "sagas" you end up liking best.

Grab a copy here, if you're interested:
https://a.co/d/bELGigK