The Pale Horseman

The Pale Horseman
© 2006 Bernard Cornwell
349 pages

Only the small kingdom of Wessex stands between the Danes and total control of England, and few are convinced that the sickly King Alfred is a man capable of leading the Saxons to freedom. He cares more for bishops and churches than warriors and fortifications, and many refugees in Wessex see his defeat as inevitable. Alfred is one of the few men who truly believes England can and will free herself, however, and his hope rallies men with a stake in freedom to his side.  Even Uhtred Ragnarson, who despises Alfred for his weak-willed piety,  has pledged to help Alfred prepare to drive the Norse away before the increasing waves of soldiers, women, slaves, and settlers make such a goal impossible to achieve. Alfred is still mulling over possible routes to victory when thee Danes launch a preemptive strike at the onset of winter: Wessex, the last hope, is lost. Fleeing into the swamps, Alfred and a few isolated followers prepare for the worst. The next fight could very well be their last.

The Pale Horseman follows The Last Kingdom in Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Chronicles  series,  being told by Uhtred Ragnarson, a Saxon prince-king turned Danish warrior who is  capable of supporting either side.  In every way but birth, he is a Dane -- but his ambition to  return to his family's ancestral domain of Babbanburg as its rightful lord keeps him  defending a man he hates. Fate gives him plenty of opportunities to reconsider the object of  his loyalties, and he proves himself time and again a 'rogue agent'.

Uhtred tells his story in a confident voice -- he is ruthless, strong, blunt, and often dramatic,  as befits his character. Cornwell uses his narrator's voice and a detailed, realistic background  to draw the reader into a setting of uncertainty, war, and competing forces. The armies of the  Saxons and Norse clash, but so do the values of the effete Alfred and those of his subjects,  whose worldviews are sometimes more influenced by the 'old ways' than imperial Christianity.  Cornwell is certainly evocative: he draws me into his stories like no one else. I could feel as though I was at Uthred's side, my feet slipping in the muck of the swamps, a sword at my side as the lightening flashed and the thunder rumbled above. I tend to read 'around' combat scenes in historical fiction, but that is not the case here -- the author keeps my attention even in the thick of battle.

The Pale Horseman is not quite as good as The Last Kingdom in my judgment (not as many fun-loving Danes, alas, and there's less mystery as to the end-page resolution),  but remain excellent historical fiction nonetheless featuring good writing, a lively atmosphere,  and compelling characters. This is an easy series to recommend, and I anticipate continuing in it.

This Week at the Library (24 November - 1 December)

Not a bad last week; revisited Shulman in I Was a Teenage Dwarf, which was fairly fun. The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head offered a peek into the life of a psychiatrist,  and I finished off Mapping Human History. Using genes to explore history is an interesting approach. The week's high point was Christopher L. Bennett's Orion's Hounds. I'm enjoying the Titan series more than I anticipated I would and look forward to resuming it once I finish the Enterprise relaunch.

I'm excited about this week's reading, but it's rather like this past Thursday's  Thanksgiving feast. So many good dishes, so little space to enjoy them.

• Typhon Pact: Zero Sum Game, David Mack.  Here I am reading Trek lit released only within the last month!  This is the first in a new series of stories set in Star Trek's new 'political reality', in which a handful of second- or third-rate states have banded together to form a major political bloc to threaten the weakened Federation and Klingon empire.
• The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking. This was missing when I first went at it, and now the library's found it and put it on reserve for me. I've been wanting to start boning up on my physics again.
• The Pale Horseman is splendid so far. 
• The Earth Shall Weep is still driving my attention, but Mack will give it serious competition.
• I'm still reading from The Confessions by Augustine, whom I'm now calling 'Gloomy Gus'.
• I've read the prologue of The Eye of the World, but I am not 'into' it yet. I want to follow up on my friends' recommendation,  but it has too much competition this week.

Selected Quotations:

If the Caribbean natives suggested the Golden Age, the urban societies of Central American and Mexico must have seemed like a nightmare version of Islam, rekindling and intensifying all the Spainiards' old feelings of hate and insecurity  when confronted by a powerful infidel civilization. Mexico City was larger than any city in Europe at the time, a bast expanse of canals, plazas, markets, temples, and brightly colored houses, shops, and schools. An army of a thousand men kept the streets clean; waste was removed by barge to be processed as fertilizer and the elite, like Moorish nobles, bathed every day. (When meeting Spaniards, they often held flowers to their noses to disguise the stench.) But in a world where the Islamic faith was routinely described as diabolical, the Aztec religion, with its cult of human sacrifice, seemed inexpressibly appalling. 

(p. 35, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America)

As the historian Francis Jennings eloquently puts it, "The American land was more like a widow than a virgin. Europeans did not find a wilderness here; rather, however involuntarily, they made one. Jamestown, Plymouth, Salem, Boston, Provident, New Amsterdam, Philadelphia -- all grew upon sites previously occupied by Indian communities.... the so-called settlement of America was a resettlement, a reoccupation of a land made waste by the diseases and demoralization introduced by the newcomers."

(p. 77, Earth Shall Weep)

Mapping Human History

Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past through Our Genes
© 2002 Steve Olson
292 pages

Mapping Human History caught my attention a couple of weeks ago given my interests in evolution and anthropology. Author Steve Olson offers a quick history of human settlement throughout the globe, throwing in some light genetics discussion along the way. He uses specific populations as case studies to demonstrate how genetic historians can track certain haplotypes through time. This is more difficult than it sounds, because despite the distance between human populations and the role of geography in separating particular groups from the other, human beings as a group are unusually homogeneous: the little differences of skin tone and nose width are infinitesimal compared the many similarities, leading Olson to discount not just 'races', but most ethnic groups. In Olson's research, finding long strands of 'junk' DNA that have no known purpose was easier than tracking genes with a role in influencing our outward appearances.  He believes that as time progresses and globalization continues its course, race as a concept will fade away. He uses Hawaii to imagine what a society might be like.

Interesting and readable; it's a different perspective for history students like myself, one worth considering. Especially interesting to me this week given that I'm reading a history of native America is that there's some genetic evidence to support the idea that there were humans in North America before the big Clovis expansion which is usually the attributed cause of the Americas' indigenous population. While archaeologists have found some artifacts on the east coast and Central America  that are far older than previously expected,  some native Americans also carry in them a particular haplotype absent in Asians, but present in but long-time removed from Europeans. This would mean that people carrying European genes arrived and intermarried with the various people of North American before Leif Erikson and the Age of Discovery.  This haplotype has also appeared in northern Siberia, which might mean they followed the same course that the Clovis people did. Historians already utilize clues from language and art styles to piece together the histories of people, and genetic seems a fascinating new addition to the 'toolbox'.

Top Ten Tuesdays: Fictional BFFs

Top ten characters I'd like to be best friends with....well, this is going to be fun.

1. Ducky, California Diaries (Ann M. Martin)

Ducky is a sixteen-year old guy living alone with his older brother while his parents explore Pompeii. A sophomore in high school, Ducky is feeling the strain of growing up as his two childhood best friends move away from him. This is a shame, because Ducky's a great guy. Ducky is cool. He has his own eccentric sense of style, he's fun to be around, and he's always there for his friends -- going out of his way to support them, like the time he drove to Venice to find Sunny after she ran away. He makes his appearance in the series by rescuing a few humiliated freshmen who just escaped  dangerous hazing incident, and remains devoted to the welfare of his friends throughout the series -- even stopping a suicide attempt.

2. Dobie Gillis,  The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (Max Shulman)

Dobie Gillis is not a good guy to be friends with.  He's girl-crazy! He's always out of money and asking for more from friends, and he wouldn't think twice about "borrowing" your car to chase some girl halfway across the continent because he's so madly in love and must woo her.  How can you study for exams with a fellow who's always staring dopily in the distance or moaning over his romance woes?  But you can't help being friends with Dobie, because he's charming -- and hilarious. How can you resist listening to the results of his latest scheme gone awry? " And he really is an interesting fellow, with varied interests in Egypt, chemistry, and philosophy. (Okay, so he only took chemistry to get close to that one girl, and together they called themselves Pierre and Marie, and they were locked in a schoolroom closet for the better part of a weekend with only pickles to tide them over while they feverishly worked out solutions to the work they'd missed during the term when they were being proper hedonists instead of academics.)

3. Hermione Granger, Harry Potter series (J.K. Rowling)

Hermione is such a lovable little smart-ass know-it-all. I wouldn't want to join her in nearly getting killed (every.single.year), but most of my friends tend to be nerds of one stripe or another -- mostly history geeks or music majors. Given my own fondness for books, seems we'd hit it off.

Except on days when Ravenclaw battled Gryffindor on the quidditch pitch, I guess.

4. Aximili Esgarrouth Isthill - okay, let's just go with "Ax". Animorphs

All the kids in the animorphs crew seem like good people to be around, with the exception of Rachel, who is crazy aggressive and loves malls.  Tobias and Marco are the most likable to me, but the human kids have a tough time psychologically coping with years of brutal guerrilla war against the Yeerks who are attempting to take over the world -- especially Marco, who fights them as an actual gorilla. Doesn't help that the military leader of the Yeerks has taken oer his mother's body.  Aximili comes from a culture used to fighting the Yeerks, and his alien perspective makes even watching commercials with him interesting. He can be oddly logical, but at the same time is full of pride. Just...don't let him go near a food court, especially not one with a Cinnabon.  He's also the source of many running jokes.

Ax: We have twenty-six of your minutes left.
Marco: We're on Earth, Ax. They're everyone's minutes.
Ax: (quite deliberately) We now have twenty-five of your minutes.


Jake: Don't call me prince, Ax.
Ax: Yes, Prince Jake.

5. Sam Yeager, WorldWar/Colonization series, Harry Turtledove

In my experience characters named 'Sam' tend to be everymen, and Sam Yeager surely fits the bill. Readers meet him in the WorldWar series as a minor league baseball player who turned soldier after the outbreak of World War 2. Sam passed his long hours on trains during his ballplaying days reading magazines like Astounding Stories, enjoying authors like Asimov and Lester del Ray.  When World War 2 is interrupted by an invasion of spacefaring lizards, Sam's SF-strengthened imagination allows him to work with lizard POWs. He  becomes the United States' chief expert and is later sent as an ambassador to the lizard Homeworld when the various nations of Earth begin sending ships out into space.  He remained likable throughout the series, especially when he stood up against his own government in ethical protest.

6. Liz Ortecho & Alex Manes, Roswell High

Liz is the girl on cover one, while Alex is the male on cover two.

You know, not everyone responds well to learning that one of their friends is an alien, but Liz and  Alex don't hesitate to step up and help.  They didn't know what they were getting into. I like Liz immediately as someone quiet and interested in science, but Alex's geekiness was endearing as well. He proved to be like Ducky, going out of his way to be there for people who needed him: once he sat all night outside another character's bedroom talking to her after her boyfriend was murdered by the cold-eyed sheriff.

7. Ponyboy Curtis (The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton)

The narrator of The Outsiders, Ponyboy lives with his brothers Sodapop and Darry in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma. Like everyone else in their neighborhood, they're 'greasers' -- poor, working-class kids who find more support from their gang than from school or society. Though his brothers try to keep him from the violent part of gang life, Ponyboy gets in a spot of trouble after he and his friend Johnny are attacked by a couple of rich kids looking for trouble and has to go on the run.  He remains throughout the book a good kid in a tough spot, and I wanted to join him and Johnny while they were hiding in the woods. He seems like good company.

8. Hari Seldon

In the original  Foundation series, Hari Seldon is a passionate scientist who wanted to preserve civilization, and his Seldon Plan makes him into a godlike figure for members of the series who lived centuries after him -- they only see him as a holgraphic personage who appears in moments of crisis. The prequel books (Prelude to Foundation, Forward the Foundation) visit Hari in his youth as he develops the field of psychohistory. Seldon is in part based on Asimov, so I can't help but like him.

9. Gordianus the Finder, Roma sub Rosa (Steven Saylor)

Gordianus the Finder is a fundamentally decent man living in the last days of the Roman Republic. He matures throughout the series from a young thirty-something into a bearded elder, having spent his life working as the Roman version of a private detective.  Gordianus' decency stands out in his times, and as much as he dislikes politics he's forever being drawn into it: his famous honesty makes him a favorite hire of the day's ambitious politicians, and through Gordianus' eyes the reader gets to experience the struggles for power between Crassus, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, and many others.

10. Klaus & Violet Baudelaire, Series of Unfortunate Events (Daniel Handler)

Okay, I'm not sure which I like more.  At first I just thought of Klaus, but a friend was surprised I hadn't picked Violet. And then so was I...so I'm going to cheat. Who can choose between two clever, courageous kids such as these?

I suppose in a pinch I'd choose Klaus, because he's forever reading.


Honorable Mentions: Henry Huggins (Beverly Cleary),  the Alden kids (Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny) though they're rich and clannish.  Harry Potter, though he's got a big chip on his shoulder. M&M from That was Then, This is Now; Johnny from The Outsiders. The Narrator from H.G. Well's various novels.
------------------------------

I enjoy playing The Sims 2, and many of these characters and other characters from their series have their names in my neighborhood. One of my favorite sims is named Hari Seldon, and he used to be the town's immortal god-like mayor. His adopted son is Harry Seldon, who looks suspiciously like Harry Potter.  I just borrow names from the rest.

Teaser Tuesday (30 November)

Last Teaser Tuesday of the month -- they go by so quickly.

"I am Alma Gristede," she said. "I am beautiful."

Well, sir, this took me aback, you may be sure! "Hey," I said, "That's MY line."

"I know," she said. "I was just trying to save time."

I Was a Teenage Dwarf, Max Shulman

"Um, what I said about your decades of experience...I wasn't calling you old or anything." 

"No, of course not. I understand."

"I just mean --"

"I know."

"A little maturity, it's very becoming on a woman."

"Certainly."

"You're definitely still hot."

Deanna threw her a sidelong look. "You'd better believe it, kiddo."

p. 134, Orion's Hounds. (Christopher L. Bennett) Things get a little awkward between Troi and the first officer of the Titan.

Orion's Hounds

Star Trek Titan: Orion's Hounds
© 2005 Christopher L. Bennett
400 pages
On the cover: Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi; Daphne Ashbrook as Melora Pazlar; CGI as Dr. Ree.

When Captain William Riker accepted command of the USS Titan, he looked forward to continuing the mission that drew him to Starfleet in the first place -- the peaceful exploration of the galaxy and promotion of Federation ideals. In its few few months of operations, however, the Titan and her crew have been bogged down by political wrangling and high-stakes rescue missions. Now, at long last, the Titan is heading into deep space to see what the future holds.

Scotty might say of the future that “there be whales here!” Soon after entering uncharted territory,  powerful waves of panic, confusion, and grief overwhelm the telepathically sensitive crewmembers of the Titan, especially Commander Tuvok at tactical.  Tuvok, Troi, and others identify the source of their agitation as a nearby school of vast creatures (cosmozoans) who live in the vacuum of space -- a school being hunted by humanoids who use the corpses of the sentient cosmozoans (“space jellies”) as ships.  Horrified at the prospect of ritualized murder and exploitation, Riker and the Titan seek to meditate a peace. Naturally, the situation is not as simple as it seems.

Though David Mack’s crossover Destiny trilogy gave my proper introduction to the Titan crew, I began planning to visit the Titan series as soon as I finished The Buried Age and decided I wanted to read more of this Christopher L. Bennett.  He doesn’t disappoint: while his character drama is just as strong as Mack’s or Kirsten Beyer’s, he adds to it a fascinating science story with ethical dilemmas a-plenty. Cosmozoans are an interesting subject in themselves. They are life forms quite different from us, existing in space as comfortably as we stride on land or as fish in the ocean, finding a home in turbulent stellar nurseries and fighting on a scale beyond ship-to-ship combat. The villains are nuanced, appearing both cruel and civilized at times: while subscribing to a hunter culture, they’re not universally obsessed by it. There’s no obvious disconnect between Martin and Mangel’s Titan and Bennett’s:  the ship's crew is evolving realistically, the many varied characters invented to staff the Titan still adjusting to their many differences.  I appreciated Bennett’s way of conveying telepathic communication, which made it clear that telepathy isn’t necessarily the direct beaming of sentences into someone’s head, but actual feelings that are difficult to articulate.  His attention on two of Titan’s more exotic crewmembers (an aquatic and a  hilarious grandmotherly insectoid) was another high point.

Orion’s Hounds is an especially satisfying Titan novel, full of interest and humor, and I am glad that Mack and Bennett kindled my interest in the Titan series . I picked the novel up at Sunday lunch and spent the day with it, distracted only by my finding a Trek production  on YouTube that merited my attention (Of Gods and Men, a 40th anniversary ‘gift to the fans’ from many of the Trek actors) As much as I’d like to read Over a Torrent Sea next (Bennett’s other Titan novel), I’ll probably read the chronologically next book in the series.

Related:

• Christopher L. Bennett's annotations
• Orion's Hounds on Memory Alpha
• Star Trek Titan on Memory Alpha
• Star Trek Titan on TvTropes

The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head

The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: A Psychiatrist's Stories of His Most Bizarre Cases
© 2010 Gary Small & Gigi Vorgan
267 pages

In the summer of 2006 I read a fascinating book by V.S. Ramachandran called Phantoms of the Brain, in which the author-neurologist described his attempts to understand the biological causes of mental phantasms like phantom limbs. The book incited an enduring interest in psychology in me, and this collection by Gary Small seemed right up my ally. It's an altogether different book from Ramachandran, who used his patients as the jumping off point for chapters on the brain and nervous system. Instead, Small simply writes about his stranger cases, his attempts to help the patients, and their impact on him.

The fifteen cases discussed are certainly fascinating: the most notable for me involved a woman who thought Small was having sex with her with his eyes and  the man who felt as though his left hand belonged to someone else and certainly had no place on his body. The young lady who fell into a diabetic coma and reflexively adopted one of her favorite yoga postures to relax was also interesting. Though most of the patients  in this book were diagnosed with emotional neurosis of one form or another, others resulted from body chemistry. Though the cases are used more for entertainment than education (not exclusively, though), Small discusses his case history with perfect respect.

Because of Small's writing style and the fact that the cases recorded here span thirty years of Small's life,  the reader also follows the career of a psychiatrist. In his reflections -- typically including discussion of his private life -- Small reveals how he slowly grew into his role as a psychiatrist. The intimidated intern in chapter one grows into an accomplished, veteran doctor with patented PET-scan variants and various medical foundations by book's end.

Worth reading if you're interested in curiosities of the mind or in human-interest stories in general.

Related:

• Phantoms in the Brain, V.S. Ramachandran
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (and Other Clinical Tales), Oliver Sachs
• The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human, V.S. Ramachandran. Not that related, but it's scheduled to be released in January and it sounds like a must-read.