Bookish Thoughts

In the eternal debate between Star Wars and Star Trek, I always come down firmly on the side of Star Trek. It's not that I don't love Star Wars; I do. But Trek is in my blood. It's what my mom watched when I refused to sleep as an infant. The Next Generation was a constant background in my childhood. It infiltrated every aspect of my life, from my preference for Earl Grey tea to my strong belief that the world is improving and will continue to do so. Despite that, I've only every considered myself a casual fan at best. I'd only ever seen parts of any of the television shows. I've seen exactly one of the movies. I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of the minutiae of the Star Trek universe. I never sought out fan fiction or the novelizations of the series (though I do have my preferred ships). I certainly don't speak Klingon. For the past year and a half (ish) I've set about diving deeper into the show. I sat down and watched the first two seas...

Matriarch  was a Christmas gift from Kevin. Something he picked up dirt cheap at a discount bookstore to put in my stocking. This worked out great with  A Star Shall Fall  a couple of years ago, so it makes sense he'd turn it into an annual tradition. But it took me a while to work up to this book. It's the fourth in a series, and I wasn't about to see out the first three books just to read this one. Especially because at least one of those books is no longer available in print. Which doesn't bode well for the series. So I went in with reservations, fully prepared to abandon the book after the first few chapters. It was definitely confusing at first. I ended up googling the plots of the first three books to catch myself up. I'm still not sure I'm straight on the various alien species, but I sorted it out enough for the story to make sense. And surprisingly enough, it drew me in and held my attention right up to the end. Like any good sci-fi, this story holds...

Aliens! Physics! Deep and difficult questions about whether humanity is inherently evil! I have to admit that I was wary going in to  The Three-Body Problem . It was a best-seller in China in 2009 and was just translated to English last year. I've heard a lot of people express difficulties about it. The language is stilted and the story seems to jump and focus on strange things. Some of that is cultural differences, others may be put down to translation. The point is that despite the great reputation of the book, I had some pretty low expectations. So I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Yes, it does jump around a lot. There's a game that seems to come out of nowhere and initially put me in mind of Neal Stephenson's  Snow Crash , which I found difficult. The aliens are weird and you have to seriously suspend your disbelief to accept them. But the science side of things was awesome, and I absolutely loved one of the main characters, Ye Wenjie. It's ...

I have a weird relationship with Ursula K Le Guin's work. I feel like I'm supposed to like her more than I actually do. Not that I actively dislike her. But I always find myself disagreeing with her about something fundamental. As beautiful as her prose tends to be, and as forward-thinking and progressive as many of her ideas are, we just seem to be coming from different places. I think it boils down to the fact that she's espousing feminist ideas from a generation or two ago, and they simply aren't radical enough to interest me. The Left Hand of Darkness does some interesting things with gender by essentially getting rid of it in all but on character and making that one character undeniably alien. A more strange stranger in a stranger land than anything Heinlein ever conceived. And to an extent it's interesting to see this alien, Genly Ai, continuously project gender onto everyone around him. It makes sense. As the book points out the very first t...

I'm really surprised that I didn't read Carl Sagan's Contact before now. I mean, it's my life and I know that there was always something else I wanted to read. But looking back, I really wish I had read this book in high school. I think a lot of what Ellie experiences in the first few chapters would have prepared me better for the massive amount of sexism I suddenly encountered in college. I'm impressed with how well Sagan captured the experience of being a woman in science. Mostly I really liked this book. The science that went in to sending and then decoding the message was really interesting. And there were some great characters, including Palmer Joss and the man who funded the building of the machine. It got a bit slow at times, especially towards the end. But it mostly held my attention. Now I just need to track down and watch the movie again. I haven't seen it since high school, but I remember liking it. I'd like to see how it compare...

I first read Slaughterhouse Five for an assignment in high school. Afterwards, the only parts that stuck with me were the time travel and the aliens. I was actually confused the first time I saw it referred to as an anti-war book, because I honestly didn't remember there being anything about war in it at all. The fact that I read it as part of a literature on war assignment didn't quite register with me. Most of the other kids read  Catch-22  or  The Things They Carried  or  A Farewell to Arms . My teacher actually recommended that I read  Slaughterhouse Five ; I don't think it was on the approved reading list. So I read it, and I do remember liking it. Some of the philosophical musings about time and free will stuck with me, even if the war bits didn't. The only part of the book that I really remembered was this passage describing Billy's limited perspective of time: The guide invited the crowd to imagine that they were lookin...

Children of God  is the sequel to Mary Doria Russell's debut novel, The Sparrow .  In The Sparrow  mankind discovered intelligent life on Rakhat, a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, and launched a mission to go and study the life there. Children of God  deals with the aftermath of that mission, which sparked a revolution on Rakhat. There are two sentient species living on Rakhat, one carnivorous (the Jana'ata) and one herbivorous (the Runa). The Jana'ata used the Runa for everything, from labor to food.  They controlled when they could breed and who they could breed with.  They also monitored they're own population quite closely, at roughly 4% of the Runa population. Of course, when the humans learned about these strict breeding policies, they were appalled.  And they incited the Runa to revolution. Children of God  follows the aftermath of this.  How the revolution plays out and what it's consequences are. Parallel to th...

The Sparrow  is about humanity's first encounter with extraterrestrial life. The Sparrow  is about the meeting, blending, and clashing of two cultures. The Sparrow  is about the frontier spirit that pushes us to always explore. The Sparrow  is about a group of people coming together to form a family. The Sparrow  is about one man's struggle to find God, and his despair at what he finds. The Sparrow  is about tragedies that result from miscommunication. The Sparrow  is about sacrifice and love. The Sparrow  is a rich, important book, and you should read it. In the year 2019, humanity discovers intelligent life on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. While the UN is arguing over whether it's worth sending people to a planet over 4 lightyears away, the Vatican quickly and privately pulls it's own mission together.  And so four Jesuit priests, a physician, an engineer, an astronomer, and a computer scientist embark on an a...