Just a quick note to let you know that this page *has* been active since 2017, but it’s been more involved with maintenance and catching up with older content.
I recently added an archive of writing I did for Amherst College, including numerous stories relating to the Emily Dickinson Museum. I’m also in the process of adding some older pieces I wrote, for fun and nostalgia.
And I will be resuming the Bantam reads.
Stick around.
No, it’s not a musical. Though it could be.
So, the book starts with an interesting idea, jumping off from something that always confused me about the “map” of three-dimensional space. I’ve never been clear just what the Romulan Neutral Zone looks like, a matter made even more confusing by the egg-shaped area shown in Star Trek II as the Klingon Neutral Zone, which doesn’t jibe with the big old line through space shown on the screen in the episode “Balance of Terror.” Where does this line extend to? If there’s no up or down in space, how is it demarcated?
Anyhow, Vulcan! starts with the Enterprise heading towards the plant Arachnae, because, as it turns out, the Romulan Neutral Zone has been drifting over the years, and soon the planet will be in Romulan territory. And there’s concern about the natives of Arachnae (come on, just guess what they look like, and don’t look at the cover) may be put in harms way by this. So the Enterprise is sent to figure out if the Arachnaeans are sentient enough to save. There’s some business about how they get around the Prime Directive that I’ve already forgotten because of this book’s precipitous decline into the sillies.
You see, Spock and McCoy are all in a tizzy of a competition, and Kirk is in full eyeroll mode. Why? because a certain Dr. Katalya Tremain is coming to help with the mission, because she’s an expert on all things Giant Bug, and both these fellows think she is just the totes best thing to come aboard since Harry Mudd unloaded his “cargo” that time.
So we meet Dr. Tremain. And she is brilliant. And beautiful. And the author likes to keep reminding us that she has big boobs.
But here’s the kicker: she hates Vulcans. Hates. I’m not saying that kind of low-level bigotry that McCoy will blindside us with when the writers of the original series need to come up with some conflict to keep the dialogue going. I mean she is an out-and-out Vulcanophobe, and demands to be taken off the mission when she catches sight of Mr. Spock, whose human side is secretly crushed by this, but whose Vulcan side wants to study this like some kind of unknown fungus.
And here’s where the book starts to unravel for me. There’s a decent novel in here somewhere, or at least a short story. But it turns out that the why-does-this-woman-hate-vulcans plot, which should be the B plot completely takes over the first half of the book, grinding the story to a halt, and it takes a long time for what should be the A plot, the adventures on Planet of the Ant People, to get revving up again.
Gee, I wonder why they call the place Arachnae
So the patient reader will plod on through the story. We learn that there’s a little cadre of bigots on the Enterprise who all have petty beefs with Spock, who hope to enlist Tremain in their plan to get Spock booted. She rebuffs them, apparently concluding that her hated of Vulcans, the cause of which is still a mystery at this point but a surprise to no one later in the book, is a more worth hate, or something.
I kept hoping there was a good back story to explain her hatred of Vulcans, some horrible Hitchcock-like reveal involving her mother being killed by a pon-farr-crazed Vulcan, but no, it’s nothing that interesting.
And then, of course, we get the whole enemies-have-to-join-forces-to-survive story between her and Spock, which goes exactly where you know it will go, this being 70s Trek.
Oh, and I haven’t mentioned yet that McCoy has gone about wooing Tremain, and there’s several skin-crawly scenes where he is trying to analyze her and bed her at the same time.
As he unpacked a drawer full of soft, sheer night-robes, McCoy felt that he had to know more about her phobia. The transparent garments, scented with lavender, were telling him a great deal about her romantic nature, and he wanted to know what sort of mental mine field he might have to walk through on the way to seeing her model those delicious bits of silk and lace. Spock and Vulcans were no competition for a pretty woman, nightgowns, and a bedroom.
‘Tell me, Katalya,” he said, tucking the last of the negligees away, “just why do you hate Vulcans so much? It’s a sad flaw in a lady as nice as you are. It’s a downright pity, too.”
Ewwwwwwwww.
Ultimately, this isn’t a good one, but it has a certain bad-but-good element to it, like parts of Spock Messiah, to keep the reader going, unlike Price of the Phoenix, say.
The ending gets very trippy and yet anticlimactic, and it gets incredibly talky. Kirk doesn’t get a ton to do except yell at the Romulans. Oh, did I not mention that the Romulans show up for the first time in an original novel? They don’t come off very well.
And there’s not enough ant people.
in an alternate timeline, Edith Keeler has been to Arachnae, and she still gets killed.
Harcourt Fenton Mudd. Or Leo Walsh if you’re nasty.
Who would have thought our beloved space pimp could inspire such controversy, but apparently the whole concept of a flesh-peddling rogue has not aged well, and Harry Mudd continues to inspire debate, as could be seen when social media erupted with the rumor/news/hoax that the latest incarnation of the franchise, Star Trek Discovery, will include Mudd as a reoccurring character.
Harry Mudd is certainly an oddity. He makes two appearances in TOS and a return in TAS, and none of those episodes are exactly the series at its finest. But some people love a lovable confidence man, so take from that what you will.
As things turned out with the Bantam line, “Mudd’s Women” and “I, Mudd” were the last two episodes out the gate from the series of adaptations penned by James Blish. Sadly, Blish died before the task was completed, and his widow J. A. Lawrence finished his legacy.
Bantam published the two stories in 1978 in a package that includes an original novella by Lawrence, “The Business, as Usual, During Altercations,” presenting the collection as Mudd’s Angels.
The credit goes to Bob Larkin for painting probably the most entertaining cover of the Bantam line:
don’t hate the playa, hate the game
In the interest of full disclosure, I did not finish the episode adaptations for this review. Not that they aren’t enjoyable, but I just wanted the look at the original story. What I read would indicate that Lawrence does a great job of preserving Blish’s particular voice. If you haven’t read the Blish adaptations, I strongly encourage it. They provide an original look into stories we know backwards to forwards, sometimes including details that were abandoned or cut from production. Blish has a great traditional sci-fi tone that makes the stories a joy to read. Barnes & Noble currently sells a lovely hardback edition of 40 of the best episode adaptations.
But back to Mudd’s Angels. The reprint would redub the volume Mudd’s Enterprise, possibly because Charlies Angel’s was a distant memory by then? But neither title is quite accurate. Mudd never takes over the Enterprise, and as for his angels … um …
“The Business, as Usual, During Altercations,” as the story is actually called (and Bantam can be forgiven for not putting that one on the cover) is an odd one. It has some of the not-quite-TOS-that-we-know feel of Blish’s stories. Some of the characters seem off. Spock smiles. McCoy seems a little panicky. Kirk ultimately doesn’t get a ton of things to do. Prayer is mentioned when all hope looks lost.
The plot starts off interesting enough, involving Mudd having escaped the planet of the androids (the TAS sequel “Mudd’s Passion” is not referenced at all here, apparently for legal reasons) and somehow getting a monopoly on the galaxy’s supply of dilithium. What ensues includes the Federation teaming up with Klingons and Romulans, a chase across the galaxy, tracking down the real Stella (and her mom), time travel, android Mudds and Uhuras, Chekov hallucinating that he is the Mongol Tamerlane, and there’s possible destruction of the galaxy by replicating dilithium crystals. Whew. It all starts feeling like there could be a decent post-2009 movie in here, what with all the chasing and loosely-canonical fan service.
All this breakneck action and plot ultimate comes to a climax … with a trial sequence. Over the civil rights of androids, who sue Mudd for damages. Like seriously, discussions of interstellar law, like you were zooming through hyperspace only to completely stumble over the opening crawl of The Phantom Menace. A debate about the rights of androids, years before The Next Generation tackled it in a much better fashion.
Oh, and in all this, a new character is introduced, Yeoman Weinberg, a psychohistorian whose presence in the story is baffling. I think the intention was to provide a little comic relief or to provide exposition and reaction, but in actuality he’s not really given much to do, as I recall, and his observations in the story feel like an intrusion and digression taking screen time away from the main characters. Not really a Marty Stu or an effective comic relief, he could have been easily edited out.
It’s kind of a fun story, but the end sequence completely takes the steam out of things. Also, Mudd comes off a bit dark, as evidenced by his treatment of the androids, which elicited a whew laddie buck from me as I read it. His ultimate fate will please the Mudd-haters, but I doubt they would be reading this book to begin with.
That original cover is fantastic, though. Really, that cover needs to be its own show premise. You listening, CBS? Let’s talk spinoff, a la “Better Call Saul.”
And back to the fan fiction. The success of the enjoyable first New Voyages collection clearly left its editors feeling they had a mandate, and that they could do no wrong. At least that is my takeaway from this lesser collection, which has even more of an indulgent fanfic feel. I do have to read some more modern fanfic, because reading this one has left me with a sour attitude about it.
It bears repeating that fans and fanfic are part of what kept Trek alive during these early years. That said, this collection has not aged well, except as an artifact of the times.
So, in sum, this volume offers more glimpses into fandom of a certain period, but with a couple of exceptions, they just aren’t very good, and are not good representations of the Trek story.
I will go through the pieces one by one.
‘”Surprise'” by Nichelle Nichols, Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath
I love Nichelle Nichols. I adore her. She is one of the classiest ambassadors of the franchise, and her personal story is an inspiration. This story, about Uhura and Spock arranging a surprise birthday party for Kirk, generally feels like the creation of someone who knows the characters, partly. That’s the part I will attribute to Nichols. There’s a slashy subtext which I can completely attribute to the infamous editors. All in all, it’s one of those stories about below decks, off shift Enterprise that is just a little too cute, but may still appeal to some fans.
‘”Snake Pit” by Connie Faddis
We don’t get to see much of Nurse Christine Chapel in the series or movies, but we get to “see” everything in this action-based story, in which Chapel takes on a pit full of alien snakes, armed only with a knife, to save Kirk, who’s been bitten by one in some native ritual. Did I mention she does this naked? Yeah, she naked.
It’s actually a pretty good story, one of the more enjoyable ones in the volume. Well written, though it does meander into some racist tropes about indigenous people. We get to learn a little bit more about Chapel’s past with Roger Corby, which gets “authenticated” in a footnote as having come from Majel Barrett herself. Oh, you tricky canon. Oh, and we learn that Chapel is actually already a doctor, and it’s still some time before that gets a nod in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
“The Patient Parasites” by Russell Bates
Offered in script form, this is a story that Bates wrote for the animated Star Trek series. Bates would later go on to co-author the animated series episode “How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth,” which netted the series an Emmy Award. That episode featured crewman Dawson Walking Bear, a Native American, who actually first appeared in this story. This story was rejected as being too generic, apparently, and for the Bantam collection Dawson Walking Bear was changed to Sulu, and it’s not even noticeable.
This story comes off as something that could have been a filmed episode, but a particularly bland one. It involves a race of aliens, probably long dead, which steal the intelligences of aliens to make use of technology it did not invent. It comes across as a mix of elements from “Spock’s Brain,” “Return of the Archons,” and maybe a dash of “The Empath.”
It possibly would have been a so-so episode, but as a story it lacks suspense, or even a point to make.
“In the Maze” by Jennifer Guttridge
This one was kind of close in story to “The Patient Parasites.” A little better, involving weird aliens doing experiments on Enterprise crew in a setting that reminded me even more of “The Empath” than the last one. I like the thoroughly weird aliens, but it suffers an abrupt resolution of the “whoops we didn’t realize you were sentient, sorry, bye” variety.
“Cave-In” by Jane Peyton
A confusing piece written as a stream of consciousness monologue/dialogue that just didn’t hold my interest long enough to figure out what was going on.
“Marginal Existence” by Connie Faddis
This one actually feels like an episode of TOS and is fairly well-written. It’s possible there’s a message in it about drug abuse or the more generalized pitfalls of seeking pleasure without a mind to the consequences, seen here in a society that keeps people in a “pleasurable” suspended animation that may actually be torture. There’s elements that are very close to “Miri” at play here. Not the best in the collection, but up there.
“The Procrustean Petard” by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath
Oh dear. So the concept of the story is, Kirk, McCoy, Uhura and a number of the rest of the Enterprise crew switch genders. Even putting aside current ideas about gender being more than binary, this story is a train wreck a la The Price of the Phoenix. Like that book, this is a story that isn’t very interested in plot setup, conflict or resolution. Once again, there is a lot of flirty wink-winking about slashy unmentionables. But while Phoenix manages to be dull, this one manages to be truly offensive. You see, femme Kirk is apparently too pretty to command, and then there’s this whole bit where Spock protects Kirk from the unwelcome advances of Kang from “Day of the Dove.” The whole premise of how this gender-swap happens is then dismissed in as off-screen and desultory a fashion as it was introduced, amid much satisfied laughter. It makes no sense to any era’s ideas of Klingon culture, and it manages to be oddly sexist, for a story written by two women.
“The Sleeping God” by Jesco von Puttkamer
And from an aerospace engineer and NASA program manager, who would eventually be technical advisor for the first Star Trek movie, a novella-length story that is actual science fiction. While the resolution of the conflict is a little muddled for me, this may be my favorite piece in this collection. Dealing with a Borg/V-ger-like ancient computer and a superbrained mutant kept in suspended animation, this reads, frankly, like a better story concept for the movie that von Puttkamer was eventually involved with. A little slow but worth the read.
“Elegy For Charlie” by Antonia Vallario and “Soliloquy” by Marguerite B. Thompson
The book ends with a cutesy wrap-up referencing the first story, but not before we get a couple examples of fan doggerel.
The first poem, while not great poetry in my opinion, still manages to be a emotive look at “Charlie X”and it consequences.
The latter poem, told from Spock’s perspective, ends with the lines, “What will they find when I am ripped apart? ‘I love you, Captain,’ written on my heart,” and that’s all you need to know.
Bantam, 1977. In which someone at Corgi apparently finally got the “Geez, can you tone it down” memo about the covers. In our fifth Bantam original: giant bugs! Illusion! Writing from an actual sci-fi writer!
What a great way to wash the bad taste of the craptastic Price of the Phoenix out of my brain.
Finally, no fanfic, finally no slash. Just a good solid story from a real science fiction writer who knows how to put together a story. Haldeman hits all the right character notes, in my judgement, showing off his knowledge of astronomy at the same time.
For a very slim volume, there’s a lot to enjoy here. A very Star Trek-y story involving a strange superior race that puts our crew in a tough situation, involving some mind tricks and some horrific modifications to a crew member. Some new characters get added but then oddly are not given much to do, but it still lends a layered novelistic quality to it. Includes some “clip show” style flashbacks to TOS episodes ( a la Blish ) and gives a peek into Spock’s childhood and McCoy’s divorce! Head canon fodder!
This is a kind of Trek novel that you might have read in the 70s and thought, gee it would be great if that movie coming out was about this. I highly recommend this one. Nothing fancy, but a great read, though because of the length the end feels a little abrupt.
I apologize for the long pause. Part of it was induced by election-related distractions, but also because I hit this book. Let’s resume.
The Price of the Phoenix was simply an endurance test, not a reading experience.
The Price of the Phoenix is, hands-down, by far, by a parsec, by 80AUs, the single most terrible Trek novel I have ever read in my life. I’m stunned that the novel line was able to continue after this steaming log of slashfic was dropped on an unsuspecting public.
I have long defended and supported “shippers” and writers of slash as just another element of fandom, but it is not simply the utterly unconcealed man-on-man love of this novel that sets my teeth on edge. Nope. I’m actually a little fond of the later slash novel, Killing Time, which snuck past the Pocket Books censors only to suffer a hasty reprint with the more slashy parts expunged. You can still find the first pressing around: it’s the one with the embossed cover title.
No, the problem with The Price of the Phoenix is it’s just horribly written. Close to nothing happens in this book. It could have easily been a quarter of its actual length, if you took out the arch banter between Kirk and Spock and the Romulan Commander, a clone of Kirk and the villain Omne, who comes across as a General Zod-ish Marty Sue as imagined by Tom of Finland.
NOTHING HAPPENS. Kirk “dies,” is cloned, is found alive, and then the bulk of the book is some sort of 50 Shades of Kirk claptrap about dominance and submission and the fear of death or something. I have since moved on and am reading their other books, and there is a pattern: long-winded porn without the porn, dominance and submission, homosexuality that seems to have no actual gay experience informing it, global threats that sputter out with vague resolution.
This book, and its authors, have apparently maintained an infamous reputation that is entirely deserved. Trek author David Gerrold, an actual gay man who finds the genre insulting, has shared some good insights about this here and on his Facebook page. I’ll direct you there, as the history is disputed, ugly and ultimately not relevant, as the book is best skipped over.
I have to apologize to the ten-year-old me who read this. I’ve long assumed that I was completely confused by this book because of my tender years, but no, ten-year-old me, you are off the hook: this is incomprehensible garbage.
I’m writing today about despair. I’m talking politics, but the details of what I’m saying about the particular strategy are subject to change, as I’m undecided about my direction, and I’m no expert on the details.
Tuesday night and into Wednesday, progressives experienced a numbing, teeth-chattering despair as we watched our assumptions about where this country was headed crumble, watched them wither into a bitter, ugly pile of ash. I sat up late, meditating in horror about our prospects as a nation and a planet, now that half the nation has selected an uncurious narcissistic thin-skinned bigot to lead the most powerful country in the world, at a time when we are precipitously falling into a state where there may be no turning back from environmental destruction.
I spent much of Tuesday night thinking about what to tell my daughter, an eight-year-old who was all excited to see the election of the first woman president, succeeding the first black president, the only president she’s ever known.
The talk in the morning went as well as can be expected. There were tears and disbelief on her part, and on my part, reassurances that we (as white middle-class people of European background, I thought to myself) will be safe, and that the president is not a king, and his power is checked by the legislature and Supreme Court (which are now in the position to do as he says or lump it, I thought to myself). I hated myself for uttering these platitudes, and I kept thinking, these are like the reassuring lies you tell a terminally ill child.
A despair enveloped me like a numbing cocoon. Well, that’s it, I thought. Now it’s just a matter of time, so we might as well just make life as pleasant for the kids in the time we have left. The meteor is coming and there is nothing we can do about it. So just telescope down our priorities and hold our loved ones close and wait for the coming wars and disasters, the unchecked abuse and shootings, the happy sociopathology that now defines America across the globe. And wait for the end.
There were no tears on my part. Even prayer, often a consolation and a release for me, left me cold. Still, I was able to function quite well the following day, I think better than some people around me. That’s one of the little blessings of being a pessimist: as you are always waiting for that other shoe to drop, when that moment comes, your machinery doesn’t seize up. Still, my soul felt dark and dead.
And then something happened, and here’s where it gets silly, so stay with me. There’s a prize at the end.
I was driving home from work, and instead of my usual audiobook, I flipped on my iTunes music, looking for something to distract me, a soundtrack to check out to. Like the prayers, much of the music left me cold. There were just a few songs which soothed me, like Girls in Trouble’s “DNA” and David Bowie’s “Fantastic Voyage.”
And then the app shuffled onto a track from James Horner’s incredible score for Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. It was the sequence where Khan has started the countdown on the Genesis Device, insuring the inevitable destruction of the Enterprise, until Spock sacrifices his life to make the necessary repairs.
It got me thinking about Spock’s sacrifice, and his adage, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” And about how he bravely walked into certain death to save his friends.
And my mind wandered to an earlier part of the film.
And it hit me like a punch. Captain Kirk wouldn’t give up. He doesn’t believe in the no-win scenario.
Now, you have to fudge some of the analogies, because the film is ultimately about Kirk’s embracing the inevitable. But he didn’t embrace the inevitable at the first go. Big picture, James T. Kirk made a career of staring the inevitable in the face and laughing at it.
Captain Kirk wouldn’t give up, something inside me said, and neither should you. And the tears came, finally.
And I’ve been thinking about this more and more, silly as it is. It’s nonsensical, but the thing is: my despair totally evaporated. Where my current faith failed to do the job, the religion that I have followed since I was my daughter’s age did.
I said it was going to get a little silly.
I’ve been meditating more and more about this, and thinking about what it means for us. This is our Kobayashi Maru, and we need to change the rules. We need to refuse to accept this, and we need to fight it with all the tools we have available. Because that’s What Kirk Would Do.
Because the story of Star Trek, from the first pilot episode up to the latest film, is about using all the skills, each according to their gifts, as a team. We need to be fearless like Kirk, but we need to not go off half-cocked. That’s why he turned to Spock. We need be brave and bold, but logical. And he also turned to Dr. McCoy, because we need to remember our heart, remember that we are fighting because we care.
And we need to fight. I’m not quite sure what form that will take, but I am confident that lefties have the passion and the brains to do it. We just need to have more of that Kirk element, to be willing to break the rules, take what means necessary to achieve our goal.
Having seen how easily Clinton manipulated her opponent in the debates, I have full confidence in our ability to use the weaknesses of the most emotionally vulnerable president in history, a humanoid with a hair-trigger temper and the attention span of a fruit fly, to our advantage. We have to stop looking at it as a curse, and instead reap the benefits of this blessing. But we have to break the rules. Playing by the rules is what got us here.
Captain Kirk would not give up.
I know this is all supremely silly, for me to be hopeful because of a fictional swashbuckling spaceman from my childhood. But if this election has taught me anything, it is that a myth has an unstoppable power.
If Republicans can be inspired by an unrepentant liar, denial of the science that every schoolchild knows, and tribal allegiance to an imaginary rabbi, then I certainly can defeat my despair with a TV show that taught that peace is the way, and strength, courage, logic and compassion can coexist in our heroes.
There will be time enough when we’re dead to accept the no-win scenario.
Here is your apple. Take it.
Deep breath.
Hi. I’m leaving this note here, to let people know that I will be taking a break from Facebook and Twitter for a while as a result of the election.
Facebook, while an easy way to keep connected, became a curse this year. I’ve lost friends because I tend to be passionate about my political opinions, and in the light of the current historic fiasco, it is guaranteed that I will lose more friends if given an easy way to “exchange ideas.” I have opinions about the election right now that are definitely of the listener-stomps-out variety. I’ve been called all sorts of things by people who don’t know me, and people who should know better, and I don’t need that right now.
I’m pausing because, in spite of my ability to be a mouthy jerk, I found myself censoring myself and aligning with causes which I really didn’t have my heart in, largely because the behavior of the other side of the issue appalled me and –there’s no other way to phrase it– I was badgered by people roughly on my side of things. And I’m not specifically speaking about the presidential race, but globally about several issues.
And I just can’t bear to read the news annotated with comments from people who couldn’t pass a sixth-grade history test. Or English. Or Biology.
Twitter moreso. Twitter is a cancer. Not to mention the role it played in bringing an uncurious, narcissistic sociopath to the presidency.
There is no logic in engaging in conversation with people who would be happy to put you and your family at the end of a rope.
Is this an echo chamber? Possibly. But I’ve grown to see that ideas aren’t really exchanged, and I have better things to do than witness grown white men having tantrums and high-fiving a bully.
So I will be taking a small break, possibly to return with some serious tweaking of my news feed, strenuous pruning of my friends and followers, and lusty application of the block feature.
But I’m already seeing the advantages of being away from this distracting and dispiriting diversion. I’ve been following news, real news, and it is edifying. I will miss the memes and videos of kids, though.
As things occur to me which I might have posted on Facebook and Twitter in the past, for the time being I will leave them here. I will leave this blog connected to my social media accounts, and people are free to share them if they like. And I can be reached here if need be.
See you on the other side, maybe.
[Note: I’m taking a diversion from the usual theme of this blog to share a post I wrote on Facebook recently. I’m saving it here in hopes of more eyes seeing it, and the tiny chance that it might help someone make the correct choice.]
I’ve been seeing a number of articles about Holocaust survivors urging people to vote against Trump. I wanted to weigh in with my own perspective, at the risk of offending some people.
I took my kids to the polls because I feel this is a historic vote. And a vote that may take us into a history we’ve seen before, which we need to fight with all our energy. A vote where many people are choosing a petty, unstable rapey bigoted narcissist whose message amounts to, Fear the Other, Hate The Other, Compassion is For Losers.
I’ve been thinking about my grandmother a lot this election. She died several years ago, and there’s a part of me that is relieved that she isn’t around to see what is going on. I’m unclear where she would stand on Trump. I have my guesses, but I’m sure this election climate would be reminiscent to her. I was voting in her memory, partly.
She grew up in Germany during the Nazi rise to power, a German. My family managed to survive the war and come here afterwards. I hesitate to use the word survive, because of the associations, but it’s what they did.
Out of respect to family, I won’t get into what some faced in this country as new immigrants, being associated with the then-recent enemy. But it wasn’t kind.
I long had conflicted feelings about that. Loving my family, and yet being tantalized by the association with what was considered humanity’s darkest hour. And the questions. What could they have done, really? What could any of us have done? How would I have acted?
Only now it’s not just an exercise in speculation. It is now our duty.
My grandmother was a wonderful lady. Her brother, who was a soldier during that time, a charming and talented photographer. Among the finest people you could have for family.
Germany had many good people, I am sure. I’ve met many. Some of the most peaceful and progressive people ever.
History doesn’t care.
We can argue about the differences between then and now, the conditions leading to the rise of fascism in Germany, and why people are embracing it here. And we can argue about how much choice the good Germans actually had to change things, or whether they really wanted to.
But in the end, we have history’s judgement. Like it or not, the choices of that generation endure as a blot on that nation, and something we of German genealogy grapple with. All these years later, there has been healing and, arguably, to some extent, redemption. But it is a scar, a filthy mark that won’t be washed from history, as much as some (among them Trump supporters) may try. Germany will always be tied to the Nazis, like a cancerous Siamese twin.
You have a choice to confront evil and reject it, and vote for Clinton. She is far from perfect, quite far, but she at least falls under some familiar range of human decency. Trump, who has expressed a congenital inability to learn, apologize, or be introspective, and who has raised abuse and fact-avoidance as virtues, is a frighteningly familiar figure. A petty nonentity on whom fearful people can ascribe their fantasies. A Head Bully to whom they look to for license to give into their worst impulses. We are already seeing that, and that won’t go away even with his (please God) defeat, probably. Godwin is waived.
You can choose to succumb to your fears and vote for Trump. Or your can choose to hold onto your particular beefs with Clinton, waste your vote on Stein or whoever, maintain your charade of holding to a higher standard, and allow the evil to run rough-shod over the less fortunate. You can be a good German, relatively assured of your safety as a white person.
You can make excuses, but history doesn’t care about your excuses or your feelings. And history will judge you. And you won’t be able to take a vote on that.
Ah, Spock Messiah.
Before we proceed, let’s just pause to really examine the Corgi edition, what I like to call Disco Bowie Vulcachrist.
Suh-weet Mother of Baby Jesus.
Time was not kind to The New Voyages and, oddly, time has been kind to Spock Messiah. Maybe because it comes right after reading some very fanfictiony fanfic in the previous book, but I was more willing to overlook Spock Messiah’s faults –and they are legion– because it had a longer storyline with actual suspense.
First, rampant sexism. The cause of the book’s major problem, Spock getting his brains scrambled with the mind of some low-tier Muadib, is the fault of a female ensign with designs on our Vulcan friend. And it just rolls from there: she repeatedly gets to use her “wiles” (meaning her wiggly tush) to save the day, and the Enterprise crew are uncomfortably leering about her. She’s not really a Mary Sue, kind of the opposite.
Then there’s the characters. Kirk is a little too hard-nosed. Chekov is oddly impertinent and sarcastic. McCoy is okay. Spock –well, Spock’s brain (BRAIN AND BRAIN WHAT IS BRAIN) gets taken over for most of the book, so he’s always off. And. Then. There’s. RED. HAIRED. SCOTTY. It’s just odd: this book, like Spock Must Die, clearly has details lifted right from the series bible (you can always spot it when Uhura is referred to as being a Bantu woman) but there will be things so completely off, you think they were writing from the Gold Key Comics.
But there’s something charming in the book. It’s very epic, a very important thing in the 70s, when each novel I would imagine in my head as The Upcoming Movie. It has this oddball Dune-meets-Laurence of Arabia with a little Conan/Burroughs or something thrown in going on, that kept me going. There’s a slightly confusing twist, confusing I think because they never really adequately explain how the brain-mix thing works vis a vis the dop “hosts.” I’m still not clear how this works: Enterprise crew members somehow get loaded with the memories and personalities of select natives of the planet, but what exactly goes on with those natives? Are they aware, or just copied and move on? Doesn’t it become apparent that there’s a copied identity roaming about?
But overall I enjoyed it in a slightly-off but adventurous way. All in all, this book has improved in age.
Especially with what comes next. Get ready for The Price of the Phoenix.
Bunging a Rock at It 