We are of peace...always

If giant alien ships randomly showed up in 29 major cities across the globe bearing this message, would you believe them? That's the catchphrase for Anna, the Visitor high commander in the new ABC series V.
What makes the show great is that there are mixed reactions to the Visitors (as the aliens like to be called). People don't just bow down and worship the V's (well, some do), and they don't let them just take control of everything (like in Childhood's End). Most people in the show are pro-V, because they don't seem to do anything bad, and actually promise universal health care and all kinds of cool alien technologies. Others, like Father Jack Landry are skeptical of the V's. Father Jack is a member of the Fifth Column, a resistance group that knows the true nature of the V's: they are actually reptilian underneath a "human skin." Even though the V's plan isn't revealed (they have some vague and scary plan the whole time), it is clear to the viewer that they are evil. In the beginning, they lied about their true nature when Anna said their scientists can explain why they look exactly like humans, and then FBI agent Erica Evans found out someone she thought she knew and trusted was actually a V. It shows that they have infiltrated all walks of life and that anyone could be a V.
That's half the fun of the show: trying to figure out who is a V. After their true nature is revealed, Father Jack cautions people against jumping on the V bandwagon in his homilies, much to the chagrin of the other priest at the church. That priest is so blindly pro-V that I'm convinced he is one of them. The other half of the fun of the show is all the big reveals and twists that they have. The show is so quick and action packed, and then at the end of every episode someone says something like "We have to tell Tyler the truth about his parents" and it leaves me begging for more. Many times while watching the preview, they'll say "Next week, on V:" and at the end of the preview I shout "I CAN'T WAIT THAT LONG!"
Aside from cheap tricks like plot twists at the end of every episode, the show doesn't drag it's feet in the middle. There are a lot of characters, and there is a lot going on in each episode. The Fifth Column members are always looking for ways to help them fight the V's and convince the rest of humanity that they are being lied to, and there are many scenes with Anna and Marcus (her second in command) plotting and scheming up on the ship. What I like about the scenes where Anna and Marcus is that they have a special camera angle they use just for when they are plotting something.
The show is also very character-driven. Erica leads the Fifth Column, while her son Tyler gets closer to a Visitor named Lisa. Lisa frequently brings him to Anna (the high commander), and Tyler becomes very pro-V. Obviously, this leads to some tensions between him and his mother, but they manage to have some kind of relationship just the same. This is just one example of the character driven nature of the show, but suffice to say that none of the characters are the same at the end of the season.
I could go on and on and on about how great V is, but I might end up ruining the whole show by just giving a synopsis of it. You'll just have to buy the DVD on Tuesday when it comes out.

V on amazon.com

Star Wars: What happens after Return of the Jedi?

That was probably the biggest question at the end of Return of the Jedi: What happens next? The Rebel Alliance just killed the Emperor, and the Supreme Commander of the Imperial Navy, now what? It's a question that went unanswered until the early 1990's when Timothy Zahn answered it in the Thrawn Trilogy.
Like all good Star Wars stories, this one is told in three parts: Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising and The Last Command. The story pick up five years after the Battle of Endor (the battle at the end of the Return of the Jedi). We find Leia and Han are married, and expecting twins (to be named Justin and Joe), Luke is a powerful Jedi now, and he is training Leia. Chewbacca still hangs out with Han, and R2 and 3PO are there too. The Rebel Alliance has now become the New Republic, which is modeled closely after the Old Republic (that fell so easily to the Sith in the prequel trilogy). The problem they run into is that the Empire may be impossible to defeat completely. An obscure Grand Admiral named Thrawn has taken command of what is left of the Empire, and is a tactical genius. His plan is to reconquer the Galaxy, a little at a time. The first problem the Empire runs into is not a lack of loyalty, but a lack of supplies, so Thrawn plans to attack the Sluis Van shipyards in order to get ships for his fight (and it sets up a cool space battle at the end).
The second book, Dark Force Rising is my favorite of the three, just like Empire Strikes Back is the best of the Original Trilogy and Attack of the Clones is the best of the prequel trilogy (if you know how to watch it). This time, Thrawn's scheme is to find the lost Katana fleet. The Katana fleet is a huge fleet of early star destroyers from the Clone Wars that disappeared. It is an interesting mystery story that also results in an awesome space battle.
Book three is also very good, it is about Thrawns desperate attempt to build a clone army at the Emperor's old cloning facility, Mount Tantiss. C'Boath also escalates his search for the Jedi twins, and it results in the only lightsaber duel of the series.
What makes these books so interesting for a hard-core Star Wars fan is the depth they add to the mythology. Take this for example: Thrawn knows that the Emperor used the Force to "motivate" the troops in the Empire, and when he died during the Battle of Endor, they lost the will to win and were beaten more easily. That is why Thrawn enlists the crazed Jedi Master Joruus C'Boath to help him. C'Boath just asks for two things in return: Leia and Hans children, so he can train them and mold them into the more Dark Jedi like him. To protect himself from C'Boath's power, Thrawn gathers many Ysalimiri, a lizard-like creature that actually blocks the Force out of its area. A Jedi is powerless when they are about three feet away from an Ysalimiri, and C'Boath's Force lightning cannot enter the Force-free area around them.
This creature also proves useful in the Last Command when Thrawn is trying to make a new clone army. He found the Emperor's cloning facility at Mount Tantiss, and tried making new clones and growing them up really fast (infant to adult in five years), however that didn't work, since they broke down and went crazy from growing too fast. Thrawn's solution was to block out the Force during their development, and they wouldn't have the problems the first batch of clones had.
I liked how well Zahn seamlessly adds new characters and aliens to the existing Star Wars universe rather than recycling people and creatures we already know. He delves into the disorder in the smuggling world caused by Jabba the Hutt's death, and he adds the Noghri race. The Noghri are used by the Empire as assassins, and they have a really interesting backstory. I won't go into details here, you'll just have to read the books.
The series also gives some depth to the characters. We see (well, I see, because whenever I read a good book it's like I'm watching a movie of it in my head) Chewbacca's homeworld of Kashyyyk, Thrawn isn't just "generic Imperial Grand Admiral number 7." What is most interesting though is that Zahn spends a few pages on race within the Empire, noting that all the Grand Admirals were humans, yet Thrawn is not (he's a blue guy!).
Overall, this is a worthy successor to the Star Wars Original Trilogy. It offers all the thrills, action, bad guys turning into good guys and plenty of Lando Calrissian to boot. I really wish they would make these into a movie already.

Heir to the Empire
ISBN# 0-553-29612-4
Heir to the Empire on Amazon.com

Dark Force Rising
ISBN# 0-553-56071-9
Dark Force Rising on Amazon.com

The Last Command
ISBN# 0-553-56492-7
The Last Command on Amazon.com

The Sirens of Titan: An elaborate plan to make everyone just be nice to each other

The Sirens of Titan is Kurt Vonnegut’s second novel, and it is very obvious from the start (at least to me) how much his writing style changed throughout his career. I’ve read Timequake and Breakfast of Champions though, so I know what ends up happening to his writing style. The Vonnegut style that I’m used to is short paragraphs that all seem to be about nothing, but tell a complete story over two to three hundred pages. They are full of random thoughts (especially in Breakfast of Champions) that are funny because they are usually not something you think about. Sirens is different in that Vonnegut was still a young author who probably felt he had to write like all the other authors. I had a hard time believing this actually was a Kurt Vonnegut book, but there were a few elements that convinced me it was. One of those elements was the character Winston Niles Rumfoord, who is a character I’m sure I’ve read about in another Vonnegut book (I don’t recall exactly where now, it just sounds really familiar), and the presence of the Tralfamadorians, our favorite aliens that were also featured in Slaughterhouse-Five.
Now that we know it’s an actual Vonnegut book, we can start looking beyond the story to see what it is all about. Rumfoord is one of the main characters, and he doesn’t seem like a protagonist or an antagonist in the book. He’s just the guy that makes everything happen. He travels around the solar system by materializing in regular intervals on different planets. He does this because he (and his dog Kazak) flew into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, and it turned them into some kind of wave. Whenever the Rumfood/Kazak wave intersects a planet, they materialize there. Somehow Rumfoord also gains the ability to see the future. So what does Rumfoord do with these cool powers? He stages an elaborate attack on Earth by Mars. There were no aliens on Mars, instead he has people kidnapped and taken to Mars to form an army to attack Earth later. The purpose of the attack is to unite everyone on Earth in a new religion called “The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.” The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent teaches that God created everything, and then stopped interfering altogether. Everyone is a victim of a series of accidents, and there isn’t much they can do about it.
The purpose Rumfoord has in creating this new religion is to take away any claims that God wants this or that. It asks the questions “Why would God single you out? Why does God like you more?” Obviously then this takes away all claims to leadership by divine right. Another implication of having a totally indifferent God is that there would never be any reason to pray. If God doesn’t care anyway, why bother asking him for things, or thanking him? He didn’t do anything for you besides creating you, so your thanks is wasted on him. The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent goes another step further in trying to eliminate random good luck by making people compensate for their strengths in negative ways: an attractive woman wears frumpy clothes, the local priest carries around 48-pound weights, the most attractive man marries a woman who is nauseated by sex. The purpose of that is to try and bring everyone to the same level and eliminate jealousy. It makes everyone easier to love I guess, which is the central point of the religion: just love each other, even though no one Up There really cares.
The book is very well written. Unlike Arthur C. Clarke, Vonnegut wastes no space on pointless exposition. The other two main characters life stories are very important to the conclusion of the book, Mars’ attack on Earth is the turning point of the book, and Unk’s time on Mercury is also important. At one point, it seems that the two main characters are forgotten, but they are not. I promise. This is a very linear story with a pretty important message, and even though it wasn’t as easy to read as other Kurt Vonnegut books, I still enjoyed it. I also have a new favorite quote from it:

“it took us that long to realize that a purpose of a human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

The Sirens of Titan on Amazon.com
ISBN#: 0-440-17948-3

Way of the Wolf (and the Vampire Earth Series)

Way of the Wolf is the first of an ongoing series called Vampire Earth, which is currently on its 8th book. The series takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where the Earth has been taken over by an alien race called the Kurians. They have taken over the planet, except for a pockets of resistance spread throughout the world and concentrated in the Ozark Free Territory--the area west of the Mississippi. The plot follows David Valentine, one of those freedom fighters.

There are also beings called Lifeweavers who have taken the side of the humans, and they are able to impart certain powers on humans who are capable of possessing them. There are four branches of service in the militia known as Southern Command: Guards, Wolves, Cats, and Bears. Each branch except guards has certain advanced abilities given to them by the Lifeweavers (senses for wolves, reflexes and balance for cats, and strength and berserker rage for bears).

David Valentine is a resourceful Wolf Lieutenant who readers quickly come to like. He's a Minnesota boy, which gets me rooting for the home team right off the bat. He was raised by a priest after the Kurians killed his parents, and he went into Southern Command to protect others from similar experiences. Though in this book he's a new Wolf, he shows a lot of promise, and seems to be a natural leader. His ability to sense Reapers, the life-sucking minions of the Kurians, also gives him an edge.

In this book, he is separated from his unit when he goes out on a covert operation into Kurian-controlled Wisconsin. He finds himself posing a Kurian supporter while caring for a badly wounded comrade in secret. With the help of a Wisconsin farming family named the Carlsons, he is able to hide his friend, and maintain his cover. But when the family that has been so gracious to him is in danger, he finds it impossible to just stand by and watch.

I loved this book, and the entire series after it. EE Knight's writing is superb, and every story is so gripping I read it in just a few days. I have recomended this book to two other friends and they both love it just as much as I do. This book is unlike anything I've ever read before. Knight places you in a dark future, but with a character who won't allow that darkness to get through to the reader. It speaks volumes about the indomitable human spirit, and our will to fight and survive no matter how bad things get.

Every book of this series is excellent, but I have to warn you of its one drawback: after book 2, (Choice of the Cat), the books no longer have endings which will allow you to stop reading the series. While they do wrap up almost everything that happens in the book, they don't leave you satisfied. You will always think to yourself, "I need the next book RIGHT NOW!" or "I have to find out what happens next!" Even at book eight, there is no end in sight for the series as of yet. So unless you're in it for the long haul, you better just quit after Choice of the Cat. If you can, that is.

ISBN# 0-451-45973-3
Way of the Wolf on Amazon.com

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury is the second incarnation of HG Wells. Most of Wells’ books were a social commentary of some kind (I don’t like British imperialism, so how would they like it if Martians imperialized them? What would happen to our current class structure over 800,000 years? Etc.). Fahrenheit 451 is a commentary on censorship and the amount of reading people do these days.
The book is the story of Guy Montag, who is a fireman. It is his job to start fires. He starts books on fire, because books are banned. The reason for banning books is that the smart people made the dumb people feel dumb, so they banned the books, burned as many as they could, and now they have firemen whose job it is to burn down the houses of people who are hiding books. The result is a world where people essentially watch TV all day every day. Montag’s wife Mildred spends most of her time in their parlor, where TV’s fill up three of the four walls. On these TV’s are her “families,” it sounds like they are just soap operas that she watches all day that she can interact with in really small ways (they had a chip installed that makes the characters say “Mrs. Montag” instead of “Paying customer” whenever they are talking to her. It makes her even more involved with it). These parlors with TV’s covering the walls are very common in this world. One woman, when discusses having children says that “having children is like doing laundry! You just throw them in the parlor and give them some clean clothes every now and then!” This may not sound realistic, but I believe it does happen on occasion in our society. I lived with a guy who weighed over 300 pounds, and the reason was that he sat on the couch for thirteen hours every day watching TV. He also had the personality of a little kid, which is another characteristic of the people living in Fahrenheit 451: they don’t really get what is real and what is not. They don’t thing the characters in books could be real because they can’t see them, but the people on their walls are real because they see and “interact” with them.
So why do we care about Montag so much? Early on in the book, he meets a girl named Clarisse, who basically introduces him to the world. She asks all the silly questions, and just observes people. Eventually she dies, or something. I don’t really know. I wish Bradbury had explained what happened to her or had her come back at the end. In Montag’s hero’s journey, she serves as the mentor, which is the character that sends our hero on (in this case) his quest. Montag’s quest is to stop “killing” authors by burning their works. After he burns down a house, he realizes that every time he burns a book, he is killing the author in a small way. He makes that connection when he burns down a house that has a woman still inside it. It horrifies him so much that he begins to wonder what is in the books that is worth dying for. Long story short, he finds that books are wonderful, except when they are banned and get his house burned down.
Montag’s discovery of books leads him to betray his fireman friends, and he is eventually exiled from society because of his bookish ways. Lucky for him, right after he leaves the city, there is a huge (and short) war that annihilates the city he just lived in. The hobo’s he ends up with are all book nerds, and they have developed a way to recollect any book they have read at least once. They are Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dostoevsky, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They preserved all the books between all the hobo’s in the country. Montag is the book of Ecclesiastes and Revelation.
Bradbury probably chose the book of Ecclesiastes to be ironic, because the book is about how work is meaningless, although having wisdom is the best way to live. For example, chapter 1 verse 2 states:

2 "Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless."

This ties in with the end of Fahrenheit 451 when the literature nerds were saying that humans will always go through repeated Dark Ages and Renaissance’s, and their job is to preserve the wisdom that the books have. Also in chapter 1, (verse 18):

18 For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.

This is passage is true for Montag and the other nerds because they are sorrowful for the civilization that is lost at the end of the book, whereas all the people living in it were indifferent because they had lost touch with what was real and what was just on their TV. Next week I’ll be discussing Kurt Vonnegut’s opinions of TV in a review of Timequake.
Fahrenheit 451 on Amazon.com
ISBN # 0345342968

Five out of Five for Slaughterhouse-Five

I have a harsh grading scale for books that I read. I give every book a number between one and five, where one means the book was stupid, unenjoyable and I can’t believe I wasted a weekend reading it. Five means it was life-changing because it was so good and thought provoking. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut easily earned the five that I gave it.
This was the first Kurt Vonnegut book I read, and it was the springboard from which I jumped when I started my reading binge (that I am currently on). Since reading Slaughterhouse-Five, I have been addicted to Vonnegut, reading everything I can about his life and reading several more of his books (after SH5 I read Timequake,Jailbird,Cat’s Cradle and plan on reading the rest of his works).
One of the opening lines of chapter two sets up the premise of the book: “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” The rest of the book is written non-sequentially, to reflect the Billy Pilgrims random shifts through time. What I loved about the constant time shifts was that it made the whole book seem like a compare/contrast essay. Pilgrim shifts the most between his time in World War II and his life shortly after, however it is clear that he shifts all over his life and sometimes sees parts of his life several times. With a little help from the Tralfamadorans (aliens from the planet Tralfamadore), Pilgrim learns to just accept what is happening to him and essentially enjoy it. The Tralfamadorans view time differently than humans do. Humans see time as linear: you are born, you live your life, and you die. The Tralfamadorans can move back and forth in time and live all the different parts whenever they want to. They have seen the end of the universe many times, and they never attempt to change it; it always happens the same way. By being able to see what comes next and having hindsight, Pilgrim learns that life isn’t so bad after all.
Several Vonnegut motifs are in this book: it has something to do with World War II, and Kilgore Trout makes an appearance. Pilgrim spends some time in a hospital in the book, and meets a fan of Kilgore Trout. Trout is an old, out of print science fiction writer, and Pilgrim looks him up and meets him later on. One thing that really struck me was a Kilgore Trout story that was in the book called The Gospel From Outer Space. It is printed in its entirety, probably because Vonnegut thought it was pretty important. I’ll reprint it here for you:

"The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:
Oh boy – they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.
The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!"

It doesn’t exactly tie in with the rest of the story in the book, but I thought it was really profound. In the real Gospels, Jesus always asks people not to tell others about the miracles he performs, and I never understood why. That is, until I read this, and this reasoning makes sense. Since Jesus taught about loving our neighbors and turning the other cheek (and all the other lovely and puzzling things he said), Christianity has done a lot of terrible things to people who were “the right person to lynch.” Christianity has done many, many good things, too, but Jesus probably saw what overzealous religious people were capable of (he is the son of the most powerful being in the universe, after all). The Purpose of this quote is probably to describe Vonnegut’s view of what Christianity was trying to get at but in his opinion failed to do. He saw Jesus’ teachings as centered on “punishing horribly anybody who torments the bum with no connections” instead of “punishing the bum with no connections.”
The back cover of SH5 describes it as an anti-war book, but I really didn’t see that as the focus of the story. If you want a good Kurt Vonnegut anti-war book, go read Cat’s Cradle (which I will also be reviewing). I see this more as a description of a new philosophy of time book. You need not fear death or mourn for the people who have died, because they are always alive at different times. They are just in a bad state at the moment, but if you were able to go back in time, there they would be: alive and well.
Overall, Slaughterhouse-Five is an amazing piece of literature, with many new and interesting ideas. I found it to be very profound and just awesome. It inspired what could be a lifetime love not just of this author but also of reading in general.

Slaughterhouse-Five on Amazon.com
ISBN# 0-440-18029-5

Independence Day

Independence Day is one of Roland Emmerich’s “disaster movies,” it’s a series of non-connected films he made that all focus on one huge disaster. He’s the guy that made Independence Day (alien attack), The Day After Tomorrow (global warming), Eight Legged Freaks (giant spiders!), 10,000 BC (ok it’s not a disaster movie but it was still bad) and 2012 (the end of the world). The Day After Tomorrow was terrible, and I didn’t even bother seeing 2012, since it looked bad and I despise anything that makes people believe the world might end in 2012 (as an amateur Astronomer, I cringe whenever someone brings up galactic center alignments or near-Earth asteroids that are coming our way). Independence Day stands out from those, because it is a much, much better movie. What makes it so great is that Emmerich can take any guess he wants about the human reaction to aliens visiting Earth, and I believe he makes the correct guess when he shows hundreds of people gathered in the streets welcoming the aliens (I know I would be out there with a big welcome sign). He also guesses correctly that we would fight back when we are attacked, or when the aliens try and force us to do things; unlike Arthur C. Clarke, who assumes humans have no willpower and will just obey some alien they can’t see (I have a review of Childhood’s End coming up in two weeks, you’ll hear all about this).
The best thing about Independence Day is that it’s just a fun movie you don’t have to think much about. Some of the best sci-fi plots are the simplest: robot from the future wants to kill Sarah Connor, so it shows how she survives; alien monster is running amok on the ship, so let’s see how Ripley and the cat survive, giant alien spaceship attacking Earth, how do we fight back? etc. Some movies with more complex plots that develop their own lore can be really good (i.e.: Star Wars), but if they over-think it, the movie/series suffers or even loses some of its depth (i.e.: 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Watch for a post about that in January).
Overall, Independence Day delivers on the action, aliens and Will Smith. I might find time this Fourth of July to re-watch it, even though I’ll be in the Middle of Nowhere Wisconsin at the fiancée’s cabin.
Independence Day at bestbuy.com