I'm an independent writer with a love for science fiction and cosmic horror! Check out all of my free works here, and if you like what I'm doing, I'd love it if you'd check out my longer works.
"Fascinating" really is the right word to describe this deceptively good short story by Lydia Schoch. It's not often that I finish a story, short or long, and immediately go back to the beginning for another helping. Tumble managed to do that, and that by itself is notable.
It works so well because the story's tone is a very smooth, almost imperceptible escalation from banality, to healthy curiosity, to benign but notable strangeness, and onward through a few more levels that I won't spoil. That smoothness was a major factor that got me to go back right after I finished it; I was left wondering whether I had missed a hint or two or a page somewhere.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 Spacehere. You can also buy it on Amazon.
