Books: Star Tek: Ishmael by Barbara Hambly (1985)

Many of the early Star Trek novels, especially a few of the 1970s Bantam line, where generally written by fans of TOS. Authors like Sandra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath were huge proponents of the Kirk and Spock relationship, and more so it seemed a lot of the time, just Spock himself. Many of those Bantam titles and the early ones by Simon and Schuster’s Pocket Book line after Star Trek: The Motion Picture, were heavily Kirk, Spock and McCoy centric and a good percentage were written by women. 

Which was not bad, just a rather interesting statistic. Back in 1985, author Barbara Hambly released her first Star Trek novel, Ishmael. And for the last 26 years, it has sat in either a bookshelf or in a box, unread. When I started collecting the Star Trek novels back in the 1980s, I had a lot of good intentions of reading them. But somewhere along the line, I sort just bought them and knew I would probably never read them. It just became, in my new addiction of books, a habit to buy them. While I gave up buying them years and years ago, I still have most of the Bantam Trek’s and most of the Pocket Book editions released in the 1980’s and 90s –with 99.9% of them never read.

Anyways, I had read Hambly before, having enjoyed her Darwarth Trilogy and eventually her Windrose Chronicles. But like so many authors during the 80s, I eventually stopped reading them. Mostly, I guess, because I loved something they wrote before, and was usually disappointed with their later stuff. Not that it was bad, but that was how it worked.

(Side note: I met Hambly once, back in the mid-1980s a Doctor Who convention in San Jose. Decades later, while working at my Borders in Rancho Cucamonga, I would get a chance to meet her mother from time to time, who apparently lives nearby).

So about a week ago, bored or what not, I was on Youtube and was watching opening titles to various TV shows that I grew up with in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Somehow I chanced upon the opening credits to Here Come the Brides, a western/dramedy that ran for two seasons on ABC. I remember the show for one reason, that it co-starred Bobby Sherman, who was a teen heartthrob both my sisters loved –though until I watched those credits again, I did not know future Starsky & Hutch actor David Soul was also on the show. It also starred Mark Lenard, known to us Star Trek fans as Spock’s father.

So, I went over to Wikipedia and hunted down the show to find out what information was on it. Now Here Come the Brides was inspired by the 1954 musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It was also loosely based on the Mercer Girls, a 1860s project of Asa Shinn Mercer, an American who lived in Seattle, who decided to "import" women to the Pacific Northwest to balance the gender ratio. The show starred Robert Brown, who also, ironically, guested in a Star Trek episode, The Alternative Factor.

So what is this all leading to?

Well, further down the page on Wikipedia, it told of a crossover of Here Come the Brides and the Star Trek novel Ishmael. So coming back to my main point about fans writing the early Star Trek novels, this one is pretty much an ultimate fan book. So I went out into the garage, found my copy and decided to finally read it.

After 26 years.

The plot concerns the Enterprise arriving at Starbase 12 when a bizarre cosmic phenomenon causes a Klingon ship to suddenly vanish -- with Spock aboard for the ride. Spock's last message from the Klingon ship is cryptic. The Klingons, it is soon realized, are traveling into the past, searching for the one man who holds the key to the future.

Meanwhile, in the past, 1867 in fact, a man named Aaron Stemple recuses a mysterious man with pointy ears. Fearing that if he takes this injured man into town, he’ll be killed, Stemple secrets him away at his cabin, nursing him back to health. But the injured man has no memory of who he is, and once he is well, introduces the mysterious man in Seattle as his nephew Ishmael. Hijinks insure, of course.

Not an original idea by far, but I do commend Hambly for crossing over the huge Star Trek universe into a little seen TV series that premiered the year the TOS was cancelled. But I’m also sure, as a fan of Star Trek –and obviously Here Come the Brides- it was a cool idea to have Spock interact with the characters of that show, some who also acted on TOS. And i as noted, there is a wink, wink for long-time fans: Aaron Stemple, the man who saved Spock in the book, was played by Mark Lenard, Spock’s TV and movie father, Sarek.

The joke goes on way too long, though, and while it was fun, this could have been a short story more than a full-length novel. But that was the status of those early Trek novels.

Books: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (1988)

Books: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (2011)

On the eastern side of Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Michigan, lays Westish College. It’s a small liberal arts school, more known for, it seems, Herman Melville and Moby Dick, than baseball. Still, it is here where baseball phenom Henry Skrimshander arrives on a full ride based on the Harpooners team captain’s Mike Schwartz’s recommendation. The Harpooners have never won a championship in over the 100 years of existence, and Schwartz sees the potential in Henry. And through Henry, Mike sees a way out of failure. Which is what, essentially, frames this novel. 

Doc Hammer and Christopher McCulloch, who created the cult animated series The Venture Bros. on the Cartoon Network, have often spoke about the fact that their parody of Jonny Quest was about failure, that the series was about the “failure (that) happens to all of us.” And in The Art of Fielding there is one epic choke, and then a host of failures that are caught in its wake.

The choker is Henry, who has been a flawless at shortstop, the sheer definition of perfection. Mike Schwartz knows he’s headed for the major-leagues contract; big-time scouts and agents are starting to hover. But then...something happens. Henry's brain betrays him. He loses confidence, botching even the most routine throws. He has no idea why, and nothing seems to help. His anxiety grows more as scouts and agents begin to hover around, hearing of his legend. But even Schwartz, studying to be a lawyer, is discovering that his failure to get into graduate school is tied up with Henry’s future, which makes the badly body-damaged senior try even more to get Henry out of his funk. Then there is fellow baseball player Owen, who is a gay, biracial student whom his teammates have nicknamed “Buddha.” Owen spends most of the time on the bench, a book light wedged to the bill of his cap reading, mostly philosophy. A bad throw by Henry injures Owen, which opens the door to more of the young man’s issues, but also allows the College President, Guert Affenlight, longtime bachelor with a grown daughter, to finally express his love for Owen –one which obviously must be kept quiet. And finally, the prodigal daughter, Pella, arrives at Westish. While she arrives with only a purse, the baggage of her failed marriage in San Francisco will soon catch up with her.

It goes without saying, that one might want to pick-up Moby Dick and get a refresher course on Harbach’s themes. But The Art of Fielding is no more about baseball than it is about Herman Melville, but having a working knowledge of both might enhance the enjoyment of the book. Still, I find the obsession with perfection and the driving force that can sometimes drive people mad, very interesting. Each character is at a crossroads, and they need each other to decide where they’ll go from maelstrom that is currently affecting them. But, as always, no book is perfect. And while The Art of Fielding is nearly flawless, its characters are not fully realized, and the ending to just too tidy and Hollywoodish for my taste. Still, the prose is strong and the humor more organic than sitcom. I’ve read that HBO has acquired the rights to the book, and is adapting it into a series. Pretty impressive for a debut author.

Books: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu (2010)

I am not going to say I completely understand what this book was about, though it’s safe to say had I not read some Jasper Fforde or Kurt Vonnegut, I would be completely confused. Still, the novel is clever, and funny and filled with a lot of 20^th Century ideals about science fiction.

Every day in Minor Universe 31 people get into time machines and try to change the past. That's where Charles Yu, time travel technician, steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he's not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. The key to locating his father may be found in a book. It's called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and somewhere inside it is information that will help him. It may even save his life.

The novel is not linear, nor is really plotted out. But, I think, that’s the point. Charles spends most of the book hiding in his time machine, not really working, and dwelling on his childhood relationship with his father. And that is about as far as the plot goes, but by adding a sort philosophical conversations about time travel, about life, about the choices we make and don’t make, author Yu gives us a glimpse into the soul of how we see our past. Thus we have an often razor-sharp, at times hilarious, and very touching novel about a son searching for his father .

Books: One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde (2011)

In most ongoing series, if the author does not change things enough, the series has a tendency to become bogged down in too much ennui, Piers Anthony Xanth novels as an example. On the other hand, too much change can lead to fans abandoning the series, like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series which introduced too many character’s that took over for the main ones of the earlier books.

Japer Fforde, it appears, is trying to keep his ideas from getting too boring by shuffling the deck from time to time. In the fourth book of the Thursday Next series, he jumped ahead two years, from alternate 1985 to 1987. In the fifth book, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels, he moves even further in time, to 2002. Now in the sixth novel, One of Our Thursdays is Missing, he shifts from the first person narration of our hero to the “written” version of our hero.

The BookWorld has undergone a transformation from Great Library format to a Geographic format. Sounding like a theoretical version of a Dyson Sphere, the BookWorld now has all the forms of writing organized into clusters of islands that are divided into genres. Related genres are located near to each other and trade text, plot devices, metaphors and so on. All is not well, however, with a genre war about to erupt. Jurisfiction agent Thursday Next is due to chair peace talks in a week’s time only she has vanished in suspicious circumstances. Worried about the consequences of the impending battle Jurisfiction turns to the written Thursday Next who is living in a small corner of speculative fiction, maintaining her five book series and trying to keep her readers and fellow characters happy. She is asked to investigate the mysterious break-up of a vanity book that was being transported across BookWorld, leaving a trail of narrative debris in its wake. Soon the Men in Plaid, agents of the Council of Genres, are trailing after her, her understudy is upstaging her, and her Designated Love Interest is revealed to have a murderous back story. Written Thursday has to live up to the reputation of her real world counterpart and save the day or risk being erased from the BookWorld.

What Fforde has done, by changing the personality of Thursday, yet still have Thursday narrate the tale, thus not changing the perspective of the series, is rather brilliant. It’s the same Thursday, really, but very different one at that. In some ways, this Thursday is like how Doctor Who changes the Doctor, different actor, but still the same Doctor. Confusing I know.

Fforde explains it better: “Oddly, I preferred Thursday when she was still unsure and afraid of the BookWorld. Where everything was dangerous and perplexing and death, disaster, danger and mayhem lurked at every corner. The Thursday we saw in First Among Sequels felt a bit too superhuman and a bit world-weary so I wanted to get back to a Thursday who had more problems than experience. The written Thursday fits the bill perfectly.”

The series continues its puns (a hotel called Inn Uendo), its take on all the genres of the written word (poking fun at Photography, where B&W and Color remain bitterly divided and others) and what it means to live in a world where everything has a purpose, where nothing’s meaningless. Fforde also gives the written Thursday a chance to visit the RealWorld and gives the reader a new way to look at our lives.

The only issue I have, is perhaps small, but shows while Ffords creativeness appears to have no boundaries, he has a tendency to get bogged down it as well, which effectively makes the novel less I-need-to-turn-the-page-to-find-out-what-happens-next. But your still astounded at his cleverness, how me makes reading, its concepts as such, more enjoyable. As a matter of fact, I would say that anyone who wants to study literature, but does not understand those concepts, might actually learn something.

Books: The Brothers Sisters by Patrick de Witt (2011)

For generations, the Western genre has been portrayed in pretty much the same way, with its black hats and white hats, the sense of right and wrong and glory of the hero ending the reign of terror of some evil man. It was predictable, safe and (from the Hollywood point of view) extremely successful. But while there has always been a sort of casual violence to the genre, it never was portrayed as brutal –well, with the exception of Sam Pekinpah films maybe.

These books, films and TV shows never examined the heart of where the violence of these men came from. Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Oscar winning film Unforgiven attempted to look at the moral ambiguities the genre presented, and tried to paint it in a more realistic life.

In the novel The Brothers Sisters, we meet Eli and Charlie Sisters, infamous assassins who are sent on an errand to kill one Hermann Kermit Warm, an ingenious (and, as it turns out, extremely likable) man, who is accused of stealing from their boss, a fearsome figure named the Commodore.

Yet, as they set out, we understand that younger brother Eli (and narrator of the book) has grown weary of the killing, and wants to settle down (and seems to be developing a puppy-love to almost any women that crosses his path from Oregon City to San Francisco), while Charlie seems indifferent on the whole subject. Their conversations are, in the end, mundane and often hilarious. Sure there is plenty of Western tropes –saloons, prostitutes, sneak attacks and gun play - but de Witt shows these only to be small aspects of the Sisters lives, because the story is filled with petty squabbles, misunderstandings and a lot of hangovers.

Through the eyes and voice of Eli, we see what a reluctant murderer he is, and how truly different (yet the same) he is from his older brother. He sees violence begets violence, but is unsure, or incapable, of changing the course of his life. There is a generous man buried under Eli’s rage, one who is kind to women and animals –his devotion to his injured horse sparks a retort from Charlie, who calls his brother “The Protector of Moronic Beasts.”

The Sisters Brothers is often funny, dark and lyrical, especially when the novel seamlessly moves from causal murder to thoughtful opinions. It’s not so much a commentary on the Western genre that say Unforgiven was, but like that iconic movie, we see that while the Sisters brothers are assassins, are at times unlikable, they’re always more evil men than them stalking the old west.

Books: First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde (2007)

According to what I read, author Jasper Fforde finished his first series involving Literary Detective Thursday Next with the fourth title, Something Rotten. Now, with First Among Sequels, he begins another four volume series. And in there, lays a problem, insomuch as this one is a sort of sequel to the previous four volumes, and its plot wanders around like a drunk trying to cross a busy street while trying to pretend he’s not drunk.

The series jumps 14 years from the last, and is still set in an alternate universe of 2002. After the events of Something Rotten, the Special Operations Network has been disbanded. But you can’t keep a good detective down, and using Swindon’s Acme Carpets as a front, Thursday and her colleagues Bowden, Stig and Spike continue their same professions, only illegally. But Acme is a front for a front, as Thursday is still working for Jurisfiction and is now grappling with a new apprentice; as well as an inter-genre war is brewing and her sixteen-year-old emo son , Friday, who rather sleep than save the world from the dreaded End of Time.

There are a lot of subplots that go nowhere, and we revisit many areas of the World Building that Fforde created for the first book, which I found distracting. Fforde, though, puts to rest the whole time travel aspect of the series, as he noted that he found it interfering with his plot. Still, as always, Fforde gives us plenty of puns, more literary references to shake a stick at and takes a swipe at reality TV series, which I fond inspired (Pride and Prejudice now becomes The Bennets, with the five sisters doing inane things to hopefully not be voted out). There is also plenty of social commentary within the government of the Thursday Next universe - a dangerously high stupidity surplus, as he puts it – that could be any democratically elected government.

And since this is the first volume of four, Fforde leaves its readers with a major cliffhanger. While this was released in 2007, the next book was promised for 2009. One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, however, would not be released until spring of this year. Major bummer for the fans in 2007, but since this is 2011, it will only be a few weeks (as I'm waiting for the price to drop during our Borders liquidation).

Books: Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde (2004)

It’s been a little over two years since the events of The Well of Lost Plots, and Thursday Next has decided to leave Jurisfiction and the Bookworld and return the real world with her now two year-old son Friday. She has decided to finally get her eradicated husband Landen back from the Goliath Corporation, but soon finds herself in charge of protecting Hamlet, whose play has been mashed up; then there is a villainous fictional character that has delusions of grandeur. Then she has to deal with a 13^th Century prophecy and an all-important croquet match, all while trying to find a job and dodging a hired killer and her time-traveling father.

While the essential one-jokeness of the premise of this series is starting to show, Fforde still manages to bring his clever literary abilities to the forefront, giving us readers some pretty brilliant plotting, a whole slew of bad puns and jokes and supporting characters from the works of Beatrice Potter to the Cat from Alice in Wonderland. The novels continue in the vein of Monty Python, but I see Fforde as more a heir apparent to the late Douglas Adams, whose Hitchhiker’s Guide is still, in my opinion, one of the best parody’s of a genre anyone ever produced. I mean, American’s love Monty Python, and perhaps see the silliness as a homage to that group (which I think it is), but if I were British (which Fforde is), I would consider this series more of a homage to Adams style of making fun science fiction. While Fforde makes fun of literary works and popular fiction (where beloved English romance writer Barbara Courtland becomes Daphne Farquitt), his love of it makes this series so good.

As with any multi-volume series, it does take time for the writer to sort even out their World Building and get into the plot, which is where Something Rotten excels at in this fourth novel. And by plot, I mean he breathes more life into the characters, and gives us a better understanding of her father’s time-traveling life, along with a clever ending that sort of changes the direction of this series.