Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 51

Star Trek Discovery Deals with Trauma and Recovery in “Forget Me Not”

Here is the latest installment in my ongoing episode by episode reviews of season 3 of Star Trek Discovery. Reviews of previous episodes may be found here.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

“Forget Me Not” once again continues where last week’s episode left off, as the Discovery crew attempts to unravel the mystery of their newest crewmember Adira. To recap, Adira is a young human who was bonded with a Trill symbiont that once inhabited Starfleet admiral Sanna Tal. And since Sanna Tal knows where Starfleet moved their headquarters, talking to Tal’s symbiont is of vital importance to the Discovery crew. There is only one problem. Adira can’t access Tal’s memories and also has no memories of their own life prior to bonding with Tal.

Doctor Pollard and Doctor Culber examine Adira and decide that they are physically healthy, even though they do find it rather worrying that the symbiont is wrapped around Adira’s heart. “It protects me”, Adira declares.

Since the Discovery crew knows very little about Trill symbionts and Trill biology (though AV Club reviewer Zack Handlen points out that the Discovery shouldn’t be familiar with the Trill at all, since they showed up at a later point in the Star Trek timeline), they decide to take Adira to the Trill homeworld to see if the Trill can help. The Trill are actually happy to see the Discovery (which is a first for this season), since they haven’t seen a Starfleet ship for a long time now. They are even happier when they hear that the Discovery has a Trill symbiont and its host on board, for the Burn had the Trills badly and left many symbionts stranded around the galaxy, unable to come home. The Burn also killed off many suitable hosts, so there are now not enough hosts for all symbionts. So the return of any symbiont to the fold is a reason for the Trill to rejoice.

Initially, Doctor Culber, with whom Adira has bonded, is supposed to accompany them. But Culber thinks that Michael would make a better travelling companion. A doctor is not really needed for the mission and Culber feels that Michael, who has after all spent a whole year lost and alone in a world she doesn’t understand, would be better able to support Adira who is similarly lost.

The exchange between Michael and Culber in her quarters has some nice character moments in an episode that is brimming with nice character moments. Culber notes that Michael’s quarters look different, less barren than before. And the new bedspread and the various decorative items likely are mementos of her travels with Book. Culber also tells Michael point blank that she is a “responsibility hoarder”, which is so absolutely accurate. In turn, Michael confesses that she still isn’t sure if Discovery is her home anymore, though she’s trying to fit in.

So Michael and Adira take a shuttle down to the Trill homeworld. I actually thought that this was the first time we’ve ever seen the Trill homeworld, but according to Tor.com reviewer Keith R.A. DeCandido, we’ve seen it before in a Deep Space Nine episode entitled “Equilibrium”. Now I never cared for Deep Space Nine and only watched it on and off, so it’s quite possible I never saw that episode. However, “Equilibrium” aired early in season 3 of Deep Space Nine, when I was still watching and waiting for it to get better, and the plot synopsis does ring a vague bell. So maybe I simply forgot about it, like I’ve forgotten about ninety percent of those Deep Space Nine episodes I actually watched.

Anyway, the Trill homeworld looks supiciously like a botanic garden. Michael and Adira are initially greeted by a delegation of very polite Trill dignitaries, who suddenly become a lot less polite, once they realise that Adira is the host of the symbiont Tal, because non-Trills hosting symbionts – now that is utterly unheard of (apparently, the Trill completely forgot about the Next Generation episode “The Host”, where Riker briefly hosted a Trill symbiont. It’s certainly understandable, because “The Host” is not very good). Adira being unable to give the names of Tal’s previous hosts doesn#t help either.

One of the Trill dignitaries thinks that taking Adira to the sacred symbiont caves might help, but the others vehemently disagree, because the caves are sacred and not intended for outsiders. Another Trill dignity thinks Adira is an abomination and wants to forcibly remove the symbiont from them, which would likely kill them. Michael makes it very clear that she will not condone any course of action that endangers Adira’s life. The Trill leader, an elderly black woman, finally declares that no, the Trill will not forcibly separate a symbiont and its host, but neither will they tolerate an outsider in their sacred caves. So the Trill leader orders Michael and Adira to leave the planet.

Some of the Trill escort Michael and Adira back to their shuttle, but Michael quickly figures out that they are being lured into an ambush by the Trill radical who wants to forcibly remove the symbiont from Adira. She takes out a couple of armed guards and the Trill radical. Another Trill dignity shows up and Michael holds him at phaser point, until he confesses that he wants to help and take Michael and Adira to the sacred caves. Because Trill society is on the brink of collapse with more and more symbionts left without suitable hosts. If non-Trill can host symbionts, it might save the Trill.

The Trill saves turn out to be glowy pools of water, where symbionts frollick about, when they’re not bonded to a host. The Trill dignitary tells Adira to go into the water to communicate with their symbiont and hopefully regain their memories as well as the symbiont’s. Meanwhile, Michael and the Trill monitor Adira’s lifesigns. All goes seemingly well, until the rest of the Trill dignitaries show up, very pissed off that one of their number took outsiders to the sacred caves. There is a stand-off and an argument, which is interrupted by Adira suddenly sinking into the pool, while their lifesigns go off the charts.

The Trill finally allow Michael to step into the sacred pool and rescue Adira. Michael finds herself in a glowy CGI wonderland full of tentacly things, which keep trying to connect to a terrified Adira. Michael deduced that these tentacles must be the symbiont and tells Adira to let them connect. And now we finally get Adira’s story in a series of flashbacks.

Adira used to live aboard a generation ship looking for the Federation. Their boyfriend Gray was Trill and hosted the Tal symbiont after the previous host Admiral Sanna Tal died. Adira and Gray were happy and in love, even though Adira was freaked out by Gray suddenly displaying new skills like playing the cello, which he had never been able to do before. Gray reassures Adira that he is still himself in spite of the symbiont. Adira presents Gray with a present, a handmade memory quilt, when tragedy strikes. The ship is struck by a meteorite. Adira and Gray’s quarters are damaged and Gray is mortally wounded. His symbiont is unharmed, but needs to be transferred to a suitable host as soon as possible. Adira volunteers out of love for Gray. So the reason for Adira’s amnesia was not incompatibility with the symbiont, but the trauma of losing Gray.

Adira can now access the memories of the symbiont and see all previous hosts, including Gray and Admiral Tal. Adira and Michael emerge from the pool and Adira can now name all the previous hosts. The Trill apologise for their smallmindedness and offer Adira to remain on Trill. They also express interest in rejoining the Federation, should it ever get back on its feet again. Adira, however, wants to remain aboard Discovery and help them find Starfleet headquarters, the location of which they conveniently remembered. Adira can also see Gray all the time now, not just in the sacred cave, which is not supposed to be possible. The episode ends with Adira and Gray playing the cello together.

There is also a B-plot which involves the psychological impact that travelling 900 years into an unknown future had upon the Discovery crew. Doctor Culber has been tasked with monitoring the health of the crew and reports that while everybody is physically healthy, their stress levels are through the roof because of PTSD. Culber, who should know a thing or two about trauma after getting killed, getting stuck in the spore network and coming back to life, also notices that something is up with Kayla Dettmer and tells her that she can talk to him, if she needs it. She refuses – for now.

Saru is understandably concerned for the mental health of his crew and wants to make them feel better, but he isn’t quite sure how. So he asks the computer for advice – a nice callback to season 1, when Saru briefly found himself in charge of Discovery, when Lorca got captured by the Klingons, and asked the computer what a good captain would do. The computer suggests funny movies, a homecooked dinner and some time off. Oh yes, the the infodump sphere seems to have merged with Discovery‘s computer and the computer is developing a personality as a result. This could be good or bad. On the other hand, it’s Star Trek and artificial intelligences in Star Trek are always evil, unless named Data.

Saru decides to go with the dinner idea and invites Stamets, Culber, Tilly, Nhan, Linus, the bridge crew and even Philippa Georgiou (who would probably prefer to see Saru as the main course) to a feast in the style of his homeworld. At first, everything goes well. Saru holds a speech, Georgiou is not too insolent and everybody is making up haikus on the spot, to the confusion of Nhan, whose homeworld apparently doesn’t do haiku or poetry. There are some tensions between Stamets and Tilly, because Saru had ordered Stamets to find an alternative system to allow Discovery to control the spore drive, should Stamets be incapacitated again, and Stamets blew off Tilly’s suggestion to look into dark matter.

The tensions quickly come to a head, not between Stamets and Tilly, but between Stamets and Dettmer. Cause it turns out that Dettmer is really pissed off that everybody pays so much attention to Stamets and takes her for granted, even though Dettmer is the one who actually flies the ship. There is shouting and then Dettmer storms out. Owosegun goes after her as does the rest of the bridge crew. Culber goes after Stamets and everybody else leaves as well, while Saru sits dejected among the remnants of his feel-good dinner. To be fair, Saru’s awkward dinner has nothing against the dinner party in Lois McMaster Bujold’s A Civil Campaign, which is still the gold standard for awkward dinner parties in science fiction.

Tilly eventually comes back tells Saru that shouting matches at the dinner table were just another Tuesday in her family. Stamets apologises to Tilly, Dettmer finally talks to Culber, Linus brings Georgiou popcorn and in the end, everybody watches an Buster Keaton silent comedy in the shuttle bay and sings kumbaya.

“Forget Me Not” is a perfectly fine Star Trek Discovery episode full of nice character moments, but it also feels very much like filler. And so I was quite surprised that a lot of reviewers such as James Whitbrook at io9 or Keith R.A. DeCandido at Tor.com seem to rank it quite highly. Though Camestros Felapton is also rather meh on the episode.

Maybe the problem is with me. I simply wasn’t in the mood for Star Trek yesterday. Right now, there are things I want to write a lot more than a review of an okay Star Trek Discovery episode. There is a three quarters finished blogpost that I didn’t get finished in time and I really want to get back to that. Another problem might be that I simply don’t find the Trill very interesting. Most of what we know about them we learned in Deep Space Nine and that will always be my least favourite Star Trek show. Never mind that the Trill plot boiled down to a repeat of last week’s “Insularity is bad, cooperation is good” message. Which I actually agree with, but do we really need to repeat that every single episode?

That said, I do like Adira and Gray. They make for a sweet young couple, though I’m not sure whether the advance hype surrounding Star Trek‘s first non-binary character (Adira as played by Blu del Barrio) and fist trans character (Gray as played by Ian Alexander) did this plotline any favours, because a lot of viewers were probably expecting the gender identity of the characters and actors to matter more than it ultimately does, especially since everybody uses “she” pronouns for Adira (Blu del Barrio explains the reason for this in this interview), though I’ll continue to use “they” for now. Adira and Gray are simply a young couple in love, who happen to be played by a non-binary and a trans actor and that’s perfectly fine. Because non-binary and trans people exist and not every story needs to be about their identity. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw points out that the fact that Gray basically gets ten minutes of screentime, before he gets killed, doesn’t help either, especially not after Doctor Culber was unceremoniously killed off after only a few episodes and only a handful of scenes with Stamets. And yes, I know Doctor Culber got better and yes, I know that Gray came back as a ghost or whatever he is, but honestly, Discovery, maybe you could just let LGBTQ characters live for once?

What is more, I’m not sure if Discovery really needs any more characters, especially since we know almost nothing about many of the regulars. This episode does a good job in giving underserved characters like Doctor Culber or Kayla Dettmer some screentime, but there are still so many characters we know next to nothing about. What do we know about Bryce, Rhys and Nielsen except for their names? For that matter, what do we know about Nhan? Doctor Pollard? Linus?

Furthermore, of the new Discovery characters, I actually find Book a lot more interesting than Adira and Gray. Because precocious teens are not exactly a rarity in Star Trek and often not handled well, even though this particular precocious teen happens to share their body and mind with a hundreds of years old symbiont. Meanwhile, Book is an example of an old science fiction stock character, the space rogue, but one we haven’t seen a lot of in Star Trek so far.

Next episode, it seems that Discovery finally finds Starfleet headquarters (hurray!), but again is given a rather cold welcome (boo!) and will probably deliver another round of “Insularity is bad, cooperation is good”, just in case we haven’t gotten the message yet.

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Retro Review: “Garden of Evil” by Margaret St. Clair

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Not an illustration of “Garden of Evil”, but a white-washed Eric John Stark in “Queen of the Martian Catacombs”.

“Garden of Evil” by Margaret St. Clair is a planetary romance short story, which appeared in the summer 1949 issue of Planet Stories and is therefore eligible for the 1950 Retro Hugos, should they ever be held. The story may be found online here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

I came across this story when SFFAudio pointed out on Twitter that the entire summer 1949 issue of Planet Stories, including “Garden of Evil” was now public domain. And since I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Margaret St. Clair so far, I decided to make it the subject of my next Retro Review.

Warning: There will be spoilers in the following!

The story begins with a man called Ericson – we never learn his first name – waking  up after spending what appears to be several months in a haze. Ericson is not alone. There is a green-skinned woman named Mnathl with him, who gives him something to eat.

We gradually learn that Ericson is on a planet named Fyhon that is not unlike the Venus of the shared pulp science fiction solar system – a place of jungles and seas – except that it has sunshine on occasion. And in fact I suspect that the reason that Margaret St. Clair did not set her story on Venus is because her alien planet needed to have direct sunlight.

Ericson is an ethnographer supposed to study Fyhon and its people. He fell in love with the lush planet and decided to stay. All would have been well, if Ericson hadn’t managed to get himself addicted to a drug called byhror, when he got lost in the jungles of Fyhon during a one-man expedition without supplies or food and had to resort to taking the drug to survive.

When we meet Ericson, he has just been through a lengthy and painful withdrawal and is clean for the first time in three years. Mnathl helped him to get clean by taking him to an otherwise deserted island, strapping him down and subjecting him to a combination of injections of human drugs and the healing properties of some local herbs. The treatment is extremely painful and makes Ericson intermittently violent.

The story made me curious whether medical addiction therapy was already a thing in the 1940s, so I did some research. The results, however, were inconclusive. Methadone, the most commonly used substitution drug, had been developed by German chemists in the late 1930s and was introduced to the US market in 1947, after the US had stolen (and yes, that’s what it was) German patents and brand names post WWII, so it was already available by 1949. However, methadone was originally marketed as a painkiller and only was used for drug substitution therapy from the 1960s onwards. However, there had been other attempts at medical addiction therapy before, going back to the late 19th century. To help them get clean, addicts were injected with all sorts of substances such as cocaine, a solution of gold and strychnine in alcohol, bromide, insulin and even heroin with predictably horrible results. Was Margaret St. Clair familiar with such treatments? It’s certainly possible.

Once Ericson is clean again, he is eager to get back to the human settlement of Penhairn and find a job. However, Mnathl insists that they instead go to a place called Dridihad in the unknown heart of the south polar continent of Fyhon. Ericson doesn’t want to go to Dridihad, but he doesn’t have any choice in the matter, for Mnathl injects him with a drug that saps his will. “Mnathl had made other things in her cooking pots besides soup”, a resigned Ericson notes.

Mnathl’s drug eventually wears off, but by now Ericson is no longer unwilling to go to Dridihad. After all, the ethnographic paper he plans to publish about this adventure will hopefully help to get him his old job back. Mnathl teaches Ericson how to kindle a fire and hunt, but she refuses to answer any questions about why they are going to Dridihad and what they will find there.

After a few days, Ericson and Mnathl come across a giant pyramid in the jungle. Ericson is fascinated, Mnathl less so. When he asks her who built the pyramid, Mnathl replies that her people built it.

More days pass and Ericson is bitten by a venomous snake. Once again, Mnathl saves him by sucking the poison from the wound, risking her own life in the process. If you’re thinking by now that Mnathl is a little too good and too self-sacrificing to be true, you’re not alone.

After sixty-six days, Ericson and Mnathl finally reach the foot of the plateau upon which the city of Dridihad lies. After a laborious climb up the plateau, the gates of Dridihad finally open for Mnathl and Ericson.

The people of Dridihad treat Ericson like a prince, while Ericson dreams of the fame and fortune his paper will bring him. After all, none of the human scientists on Fyhon even knew that there was such an ancient and populous city in the heart of the supposedly deserted south polar continent. Too bad that no one in Dridihad will give Ericson any writing materials.

When Mnathl reappears, she is dressed in splendid robes like a queen or a priestess. She takes Ericson hunting on the plateau, shows him around the city and takes him to a ritual in the main temple of Dridihad, which involves sacrificing an animal and eating it. Mnathl officiates at the ritual, which confirms Ericson’s suspicions that she is a priestess.

Ericson also wonders why such an important personage even bothered to help an alien drug addict like him and comes to the conclusion that Mnathl is in love with him. This is a problem, because Ericson is not remotely attracted to her.

After several more days and more rituals, rituals which seem to be leading up to some kind of climax, Mnathl takes Ericson to the top of the pyramid-shaped temple. Ericson tries to have an awkward, “It’s not you, it’s me” conversation with her, but Mnathl blows him off and starts to laugh. She definitely does not love him, but instead wants Ericson to be the messenger of her people to the gods. “And then”, Mnathl says, “we eat.”

Mnathl’s people, she tells him, became interested in Ericson when they heard of his ill-fated solo expedition into the interior of the continent. They were particularly fascinated by Ericson’s unusual colouring, a combination of near golden tanned skin and blonde hair. And so they decided that he would be an excellent messenger to their gods and sent Mnathl to find him, nurse him back to health and bring him back to Dridihad.

Ericson now knows what his fate will be. Not only has he witnessed several religious rites by now, he also recalls a remark in another ethnographer’s paper that the people of Fyhon are definitely not engaging in ritual cannibalism, which strikes him as very ironic.

However, Ericson is also remarkably resigned to his fate. After all, he is free of his drug addiction now and besides, he got the ethnographic experience of a lifetime, even if he never got to write that paper and never got tenure either. And so Ericson smiles, as the temple guards chop off his head. Mercifully, Margaret St. Clair spares us what comes after.

[image error]This is a fascinating story, in spite of the downer ending. On the one hand, it’s pure pulp science fiction with a human explorer on an alien planet who falls in with an indigenous beauty and comes to a sticky end. And indeed, if you’re the protagonist of a pulp science fiction story, it’s never a good idea to hang out with alien women, no matter how beautiful, seductive and helpful they seem to be, because they will inevitably want to enslave you, steal your body, kill you or eat you. Just ask Northwest Smith and Eric John Stark, who narrowly escaped such a fate more than once. In fact, Eric John Stark escapes a similar fate in “Queen of the Martian Catacombs”, the lead novella of that very same issue of Planet Stories.

However, Ericson is no Eric John Stark or Northwest Smith. He’s a nerdy academic and a recovering drug addict besides. And indeed, the fact that the protagonist is a junkie makes “Garden of Evil” feel almost like a New Wave story from the 1960s at times. Not that the drugs never appeared in the science fiction and fantasy of the pulp era – indeed, a lot of SFF of the 1930s and 1940s is absolutely drug-soaked to the point that I’m glad all that stuff went over my head as a teenager. But while descriptions of alien landscapes may be nigh hallucinogenic and alien opium dens abound in golden age science fiction, the protagonists usually do not dabble in mind-altering substances.

In fact, the only other golden age science fiction story with a drug-addicted protagonist I can think of is Leigh Brackett’s “The Moon That Vanished” from 1948 (the protagonist of Brackett’s 1944 novelette “Terror Out Of Space” is also high as a kite on amphetamines for most of the story, but he’s not an addict). Interestingly, “The Moon That Vanished” bears striking similarities to Margaret St. Clair’s 1952 story “Island of the Hands”, which I reviewed for Galactic Journey last year. In fact, I wonder whether Brackett and St. Clair knew each other, especially since they both lived in California at the same time, published in the same magazines and tackled similar themes.

Both Brackett and St. Clair deal with colonialism in many of their stories from the 1940s. “Garden of Evil” is no exception, because it’s a story about indigenous people turning the tables on a western explorer. Even though he’s an ethnographer, Ericson assumes a lot about the indigenous people of Fyhon, that they’re primitive, but harmless, that they’re stoic and unemotional, that Mnathl is in love with him, that her people definitely do not practice ritual cannibalism. Every single one of those assumptions is wrong. And what makes Ericson a target is his blonde hair and golden tanned skin.

Aliens in pulp science fiction are often stand-ins for indigenous people, usually the indigenous people of North America. “Garden of Evil” is an exception here, because the names, the religious practices and the pyramid-like temples are reminiscent of Central America. Furthermore, the drug that Ericson gets himself addicted to is a powerful natural stimulant found in a type of leaves native to Fyhon, which brings to mind cocaine.

Planet Stories is often dismissed as a purveyor of cliched space opera adventures and indeed, there are many of those to be found in its pages. However, even at its most cliched, the fiction in Planet Stories is always entertaining. Furthermore, the magazine also offered a home to stories, which did not fit the rather narrow editorial standards of the more upscale science fiction mags like Astounding or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which had only just started in 1949, or Galaxy, which would start up the following year and would never publish “that pulp stuff”. Or can you imagine John W. Campbell publishing a story like “Garden of Evil”, where the protagonist is a down and out drug addict (even if he also is a scientist), who does not triumph due to his human ingenuity, but instead loses his head at the end?

Margaret St. Clair is one of the neglected woman authors of the golden age (though her careers spans both the silver age and the New Wave as well and she kept writing into the early 1980s). I have no idea why she isn’t better known, since Margaret St. Clair can easily stand alongside Leigh Brackett, C.L. Moore and Andre Norton with regard to quality of her fiction. She was also very versatile – more versatile than any of the others except maybe C.L. Moore with her work spanning science fiction, fantasy and horror and ranging from screwballs comedies like “The Sacred Martian Pig” (which I should really review for Retro Reviews sometime, since it’s such a delightful story) to downers like “Garden of Evil”.

Yet when her name comes up at all these days, it’s usually in connection with Appendix N, the one page list of inspirational science fiction and fantasy authors and novels for further reading to be found in the back of the first Dungeon & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide. Even though the Dungeon Masters Guide was published more than forty years ago, there has been a renewed interested in works listed in Appendix N in the past few years. And whenever Appendix N is discussed, Margaret St. Clair is often mentioned as the most obscure author on the list (here is a recent example), though personally I find several others (John Bellairs, Sterling Lanier, Andrew J. Offutt) more obscure.

Like many of Margaret St. Clair’s stories, “Garden of Evil” has never been reprinted, which is a pity because it’s a fascinating story which combines the adventure of pulp science fiction with the sensibilities of the New Wave. Highly recommended.

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“The Mandalorian” and Baby Yoda are back and meet “The Marshal”

Yes, everybody’s favourite space gunslinger and his adopted kid, the cutest little green alien toddler in the universe, are back. It’s time again for The Mandalorian or – as my Mom calls it – “Baby Yoda and His Dad”.

I only did an aggregate review of season 1 of The Mandalorian, largely because I initially wasn’t intending to watch the show, until the cuteness that is Baby Yoda won me over. But for season 2 I will do episode by episode reviews like I do for Star Trek.

ETA: Camestros Felapton also has a review of “The Marshal” here.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

Season 2 opens with Mando and Baby Yoda walking/floating into an unnamed town. The town is full of graffiti of Stormtroopers and what looks like C-3PO. The artist who did the graffiti was listed in the credits BTW. There are also red-eyed things lurking in the dark. And yes, I know their names are not officially Mando and Baby Yoda, but they’re called Din Djarin and the Child.

Mando has come to see a one-eyed alien called Gor Koresh (played by John Leguizamo who is completely unrecognisable under kilos of make-up). There’s no way that name is a coincidence, considering it references both the infamous Gor novels by John Norman as well as David Koresh, the cult leader who was killed along with many of his followers in Waco, Texas, in 1993.

Gor Koresh is just as charming as his two namesakes. He runs an underground fight club where two Gamoreans are bashing in each other’s heads for the amusement of a bloodthirsty crowd. Baby Yoda clearly is no fan of blood sports and Gor Koresh tells Mando that his fight club is no place for a child. Mando replies, “Where I go, he goes,” and thus states what appears to be his parenting philosophy. For Mando indeed seems to have decided that taking Baby Yoda everywhere is the best way to keep the little one safe. I’m not so convinced about that, but as long as it gives us plenty of cute Baby Yoda moments, I’m happy.

Mando has come to see Gor Koresh, because Koresh is rumoured to know where to find other Mandalorians who might help him with his quest to reunite Baby Yoda with his own people. Because after his own underground clan of Mandalorians have been all but wiped out by Werner Herzog and Moff Gideon, Mando is cut off from his people.

Koresh, on the other hand, turns out to mainly want Mandalorians for their beskar armour. He tries to double-cross Mando, which is never a good idea. And so Mando takes out Koresh’s henchcritters, while Baby Yoda – who knows trouble when he sees it – quickly closes his armoured float cradle and lets Dad do his thing.

Koresh escapes, but Mando quickly recaptures him and hangs him upside down from a street lantern. He also promises Koresh that he will not die by Mando’s hand, if he tells him the truth. Now Koresh finally does spill that there is a Mandalorian living on Tatooine. Mando, in turn, leaves Koresh behind for the red-eyed critters that lurk in the dark to enjoy – after all, he only promised that Koresh wouldn’t die by his hand. It’s hard to feel sorry for him.

And so we’re back on Tatooine, secret navel of the Star Wars universe. Mando takes the Razorcrest to the docking bay of Peli Motto (Amy Sedaris cosplaying Ellen Ripley from Alien) in Mos Eisley. This time, he even lets her repair droids touch his precious ship – apparently Mando’s experience with the heroic droid IG-11 last season has caused him to mellow towards droids. Peli is happy to see Mando and cuddle Baby Yoda again (well, he is very cuddly). Mando has heard that his fellow Mandalorian is in a town called Mos Pelgo (we suspect “Mos” means “settlement” in the language of Tatooine) and asks Peli where to find it. Peli replies that the town has been wiped out by bandits shortly after the fall of the Empire, as far as she knows, but she nonetheless shows Mando its location of a map projected by another familiar face, a R5-D4 droid. And it’s not just any old R5-D4 droid, but as iO9 reviewer Germain Lussier points out, it’s the very same R5-D4 droid that Owen Lars was going to buy from the Jawas until it malfunctioned and he decided to purchase R2-D2 instead and thus altered the course of the entire Star Wars universe (and signed his own death warrant) with a single purchase decision. It’s a nice callback – one of many in this episode. I’m also glad that R5-D4, a character whose timely malfunction changed the course of history, found a good home after all.

So Mando borrows Peli’s speeder bike and takes off for Mos Pelgo, Baby Yoda in the saddle bag. Once again, it’s absolutely not an appropriate vehicle for transporting a young child, though Baby Yoda clearly loves it, judging by the look of pure joy on his face.

On the way to Mos Pelgo, Mando stops by at a camp of Sandpeople/Tusken raiders to ask them for directions. We learn that Mando is not just friendly enough with the Sandpeople not to be attacked, he can also communicate with them via sign language. This will be important later.

One Mando and Baby Yoda make it to Mos Pelgo, The Mandalorian goes into full western mode again. Mos Pelgo is your typical frontier town, updated for Tatooine. There are windmills, raised walkways beside a central dirt road and there’s also a saloon. And the locals are wary when Mando rides into town.

I don’t know if they have westerns in the Star Wars universe, but Mando certainly knows that the saloon is the place to go for information, so he heads there to quiz the Weequay barkeeper, who is played by W. Earl Brown, a fairly well known actor (and huge Star Wars fan, it seems) best known for the western series Deadwood. When Mando asks if the Weequay has seen someone who wears armour like his, the Weequay replies, “That would be the marshal then. And here he is.”

Now all Star Wars fans know which Mandalorian not named Din Djarin was last seen on Tatooine, though he should be a tad busy getting digested by sarlacc for a thousand years at this point in time. So of course, we all expect who will come walking through that door. But there is a nice bit of misdirection going on here, for while Boba Fett’s old armour does walk into the saloon, the person wearing it very definitely is not Boba Fett. This person is a lot lankier than Boba Fett and the armour doesn’t fit him properly, whereas Mandalorian armour – as we’ve seen last season – is custom-made.

The person wearing Boba Fett’s armour is not overly surprised to see Mando; he expected a Mandalorian to show up eventually. And just in case we hadn’t noticed that something is very off about this Mandalorian, he also orders some drinks and then proceeds to take off his helmet, something we know Mandalorians never do in public.

When we finally see the face underneath Boba Fett’s old helmet, I initially thought it was Pierce Brosnan and went, “Wait a minute, I had no idea he even was in The Mandalorian.”  However, it turns out the actor is not Pierce Brosnan after all, but Timothy Olyphant who’s best known for neo-westerns like Justified and Deadwood, neither of which I could ever get into. Coincidentally, I’m not the only one who noticed the resemblance to Pierce Brosnan. AV Club reviewer Katie Rife notes it, too.

In the Star Wars universe, the man wearing Boba Fett’s old armour is called Cobb Vanth and we get his story in a flashback. Vanth was just another inhabitant of Mos Pelgo, celebrating the destruction of the second Death Star and the fall of the Empire in the saloon, when some armed goons of a group called the Mining Collective show up, take over the town and enslave the populace, since there’s now no one left to stop them, not even the Empire, which was always more concerned with chasing rebels than actually doing something about the rampant crime and slavery issues on backwater worlds like Tatooine anyway.

I’ve said before that with the sequel trilogy the Star Wars universe has turned from a place that is bad now, but was better once and will be better once again in the future, to a place that has always been bad and will always be bad. The Mandalorian had repeatedly reinforced this impression in season 1, where we see all sorts of ordinary people struggling to make ends meet now the Empire is gone, while the New Republic does literally fuck all. “The Marshal” reinforces this impression even more, because with the Empire gone, other actors (crime lords, bandits, the Mining Collective) step into the power vacuum. And bad as the Empire was, many of those groups tend to be even worse. It’s a realistic look at what all too often happens after revolutions in the real world, where the chaos that follows is often worse for regular people than the semi-orderly authoritarian regime that preceded it. Nonetheless, it’s still depressing.

The armed goons of the Mining Collective shoot up the saloon, but Cobb Vanth is able to escape. He steals one of those ice cream makers that are used to transport valuable goods in Star Wars universe from the Mining Collective goons and runs out into the desert. When he’s about to die of thirst, he gets lucky and comes across a Jawa sandcrawler. The Jawas take him aboard and offer Vanth his choice of their wares in exchange for the crystals he accidentally stole. Vanth chooses a battered set of Mandalorian armour the Jawas picked up we can all guess where. I guess beskar armour is too difficult to digest even for sarlaccs.

With his battered armour and jetpack, Vanth returns to Mos Pelgo, takes out the various Mining Collective goons and makes himself marshal. Considering he just took out an entire squad of armed bad guys, no one is arguing with him. Besides, Vanth is essentially a decent guy who just wants to protect his town. In fact, he put Boba Fett’s old armour to a better use than Fett ever did. Cobb Vanth is a character who first appeared in Chuck Wendig’s Star Wars tie-in novel Aftermath BTW, which I’m sure will thrill certain quarters of fandom.

Din Djarin is also essentially a decent guy, but he also takes the Mandalorian way very seriously and so he demands the armour back, presumably to be melted down for the benefit of other Mandalorians. Vanth, however, isn’t going to just give up the one thing that allows him to keep his town safe. Neither of them really wants to hurt the other, but nonetheless Mando and Vanth seem to be heading for a high noon type shoot-out, much to Baby Yoda’s chagrin, when they are interrupted by a rumble which shakes the entire town.

The rumble turns out to be a krayt dragon, the other huge worm-like subterranean species native to Tatooine. So far, we’ve never seen an actual krayt dragon in Star Wars, though we have seen the skeleton of one, when C-3PO stumbles upon it, and we have heard Obi Wan imitate the mating call of a krayt dragon.

Both krayt dragons and sarlaccs by the sandworms from Frank Herbert’s Dune, just as Tatooine itself is very obviously inspired by Dune. And Dune in turn was inspired by the Mars of the pulp science fiction shared solar system. Indeed, Leigh Brackett mentions sandworm like creatures in her 1945 Retro Hugo winning novel Shadow Over Mars a.k.a. The Nemesis from Terra. Coincidentally, Shadow Over Mars also has villainous mining company, the very aptly named Terran Exploitation Company, enslave random townspeople to toil in their mines.

The influences on Star Wars have been scrutinised to death by now, but while Flash Gordon is almost always mentioned as an influence, but the influence of the written science fiction of the 1930s to 1960s is still often underestimated, even though Star Wars is absolutely brimming with ideas borrowed from vintage SF.  The Dune – Tatooine connection is probably the most obvious, but the Ewoks are also very obviously H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzies by another name, while Endor has alwas reminded me of Athshe from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest. Dagobah is clearly Venus before Mariner 2 ruined everything and the Mos Eisley cantina has its forebearers in dozens of seedy spaceport bars. The Force is a New Age gussied up version of the psi powers that were so popular in SFF (largely because John W. Campbell really liked them) from the golden age all the way into the 1960s. The droids are very much Asimovian robots, even if the Three Laws are never uttered. Han Solo is a classic space rogue in the Eric John Stark and Northwest Smith mold (and Chewie is comparable to Northwest’s best friend and partner Yarol). And indeed, when I reread a lot of Leigh Brackett planetary romances from the golden age some time ago, I came across a lot of scenes and ideas which would show up in Star Wars thirty plus year later. Even more interestingly, I also came across a lot of Indiana Jones prototypes – two-fisted archaeologists with somewhat shady morals and a tendency to get in supernaturally tinged trouble – in Leigh Brackett’s old stories from the 1940s. It clearly was no accident that George Lucas hired Leigh Brackett to write the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back – he obviously was a fan. Just as he obviously read a lot of 1930s to 1960s science fiction.

The krayt dragon passes underneath the town and gobbles up a bantha. And indeed, the poor wooly banthas do suffer a lot in this episode. Vanth tells Mando that the krayt dragon has been terrorising the town for a long time now, gobbling up banthas and the occasional villager. Vanth also offers Mando a deal: If Mando helps Vanth kill the krayt dragon, Vanth will hand over the armour. Meanwhile, Baby Yoda has decided the discretion is the better part of valour and hidden in a spittoon. I do hope Mando gives him a bath later, because spittoons are not sanitary environments for small children.

So Mando and Vanth set off on their speeder bikes to kill the dragon, Baby Yoda once again riding along in the saddle bag. Vanth’s speeder bike is made from a pod-racer engine and not just any old pod-racer engine either, but the one young Anakin built way back in The Phantom Menace. It’s a neat callback, though I do find it striking that almost everybody in the Star Wars universe who is not the Empire or the First Order is using ancient technology that has been repaired and repurposed dozens of times. Anakin’s pod-racer engine should be around forty years old at this point and Anakin already built it from scrap. Peli Motto’s pit droids and her R5-D4 unit are almost as old. The Millennium Falcon is already ancient when Han wins it from Lando. Mando’s Razorcrest is just as ancient. Recycling is all good and well, but why is everybody reusing ancient stuff in a universe with as high a technological level as the Star Wars universe? Do they have no manufacturing at all (Come to think of it, the only factory we ever see in the Star Wars universe is the battle droid factory from Attack of the Clones) and what happened to it? Cause those spaceships, droids and speeder bikes were not all built by scavengers. They all came out of a factory at some point, but for some reason those factories all seem to have collapsed.

Before they take on the krayt dragon, Mando takes Vanth to see a group of Sandpeople, cause the Sandpeople not only know where the krayt dragon has its lair (in an abandoned sarlacc, since it apparently ate the sarlacc), but they have also been studying its sleeping and eating patterns for centuries. The Sandpeople are as eager to see the dragon dead as Vanth and his people, so Mando suggests working together to take it out, using the Sandpeople’s knowledge. However, Vanth doesn’t want to work with the Sandpeople and neither do the people of Mos Pelgo, since the Sandpeople and the human inhabitants of Tatooine are sworn enemies.

The portrayal of the Sandpeople in this episode is something I really liked. Because in forty-three years of Star Wars, the Sandpeople have always been one-dimensional antagonists, minor obstacles for our heroes to overcome. We first see them, when they attack Luke, then we see them again firing at random pod-racers and then again, when Anakin slaughters a bunch of them, after they kidnap and kill his mother. But in all those forty-three years no one ever thought to talk to the Sandpeople. Everybody – even Jedi like Obi Wan or Anakin – only ever treated them like something to kill.

“The Marshal” gives us the Sandpeople’s POV for the first time in forty-three years, translated via Mando who speaks their language (and where precisely did he learn that anyway?). The story of the Sandpeople is not exactly new, it’s a typical coloniser versus colonised people conflict, since the Sandpeople are native to Tatooine (as are the sarlaccs, krayt dragons, woomp rats and very likely the Hutt, since we never see them anywhere else and they’re not exactly mobile). The humans, Weequay and other species, on the other hand, are colonists who showed up at a later point and took over the planet, though considering Tatooine has slavery, we don’t know how voluntarily these people came there. And indeed, Tor.com reviewer Emmet Asher-Perrin notes that the Sandpeople very much serve as stand-ins for Indigenous Americans in this episode. Guardian reviewer Paul MacInnes also notes a parallel to the 1950 western Broken Arrow in having indigenous people and settlers working together to defeat a larger problem.

This is again a very old idea – Leigh Brackett used various Martian and Venusian natives as stand-ins for Indigenous Americans in her planetary romances of the 1940s. And while the human villains were often capitalists intent on displacing and exploiting those indigenous populations, her outlaw protagonists inevitably sided with them, so Mando is standing in the tradition of Eric John Stark and Roy Campbell here. Star Wars has portrayed conflicts between colonisers and indigenous people before, most notably with the Ewoks on Endor (and also the Wookies on Kashykk), whereby the Battle of Endor is widely considered to be a stand-in for the Vietcong prevailing against the technologically superior US Army. And yes, I’m still amazed that George Lucas was able to get away with this a mere ten years after the end of the Vietnam War.

After a lot of reluctance and hostility on both sides, Mando is finally able to persuade the townspeople and Sandpeople to work together to defeat the krayt dragon that is terrorising them both. It’s a nice solution, if maybe a little simple, but it’s also very much not a Star Wars solution, because “Let’s talk to each other, find out what the other side wants and find a way to work together” is not how things normally work in the Star Wars universe. In my reviews of season 3 of Star Trek Discovery, I noted that the first two episodes of the season felt more like Star Wars than Star Trek. And now in turn we get an episode of The Mandalorian, which goes for a very Star Trek-like “Let’s talk things over” solution. And indeed, the main conflict in the most recent episode of Discovery was resolved in exactly this way.

However, this show is still The Mandalorian and besides, a krayt dragon cannot be reasoned with (but then we once thought the same about the Sandpeople, if we thought about them at all) and so the episode culminates in a huge fight, as Mando, Vanth, the Sandpeople and the people of Mos Pelgo work together to take out the krayt dragon. The initial plan – lure the dragon out of its cave and blow it up – fails and only causes the dragon to vomit acid (okay, that one is clearly borrowed from Alien) over Sandpeople and humans alike. Mando tells Vanth to distract the dragon, which Vanth does by firing a rocket into its eye. Then Mando tells Vanth to take care of Baby Yoda, if things go wrong, and tricks the krayt dragon into swallowing a pack bantha that’s loaded down with explosives (banthas really don’t fare well in this episode) as well as Mando himself. There is a tense moment, as evidenced by Baby Yoda looking very worried, for where is Daddy? Then Mando electrocutes the dragon, bursts out of its mouth on his jetpack and detonates the explosives (and the poor bantha). The Sandpeople get the carcass of the krayt dragon (and a huge pearl – or is that an egg?), Vanth gets a chunk of dragon meat and Mando gets Boba Fett’s old armour. He is also covered in acid vomit, but beskar is tough stuff.

And so everything ends happily, except that as Mando takes off again, we see a bald and cloaked figure standing in the desert watching him. The figure turns around and holy crap, it’s Temuera Morrison with a scar across his face.

Now the last time we saw Temuera Morrison in Star Wars, it was as the Mandalorian bounty hunter Jango Fett (who apparently belongs to a clan which do take off their helmets on occasion) in Attack of the Clones. Jango dies at the end of that movie, cut down by Samuel L. Jackson as Mace Windu. However, Jango’s DNA was used to create the clone troopers and also his “son” Boba Fett. So is the scarred man in the desert Boba Fett who somehow got out of the sarlacc’s digestive tract, though sans his armour? Or is he just a random unemployed Stormtrooper?  And for the record, I don’t even want to think about the implications of having likely millions of people with the exact same genetic profile running around the Star Wars galaxy. I guess birth defects will take a sharp tick up approx. twenty to thirty years after the fall of the Empire, as the children fathered by the surviving clone troopers grow up and some of them commit accidental incest. And yes, I know I’m overthinking this, but the implications are there.

Star Wars has always been very much a pop culture and genre mash-up – Emmet Asher-Perrin calls it the rainbow bagel of pop culture. The Mandalorian plays up the western elements of the Star Wars universe big time and this episode is very much a western that just happens to be set on an alien planet. However, it’s also the story of two armoured knights who go off to slay a dragon and succeed after several hardships, playing up the fantasy elements of the Star Wars universe. One reviewer – I forgot which one – also notes the biblical parallels, since Mando literally ends up in the belly of the whale krayt dragon.

At least based on this episode, season 2 of The Mandalorian seems to be doing more of what made season 1 such a huge success: Neat genre mash-ups leaning heavily into science fiction on the one hand and western on the other. Baby Yoda being incredibly cute and his Dad being monosyllabic and morally grey, but ultimately a good guy. The episodes are largely self-contained adventures with an overarching plot (Keep Baby Yoda safe in season 1, keep him safe and return him to his people in season 2).

The Mandalorian is very much a variation of the old “A stranger comes to town…” story. We find this pattern in a lot of westerns. A stranger rides into town, gets involved in whatever conflict is brewing locally and solves it, then he rides on. However, it’s not just a western plot. The Jack Reacher novels function very much like this, as did the old TV series The Fugitive and Route 66 or the Incredible Hulk TV series of the 1970s or The A-Team in the 1980s. In science fiction, the adventures of the above mentioned Eric John Stark and Northwest Smith are very much variations on the stranger who comes to town a new planet, as is Doctor Who. So is my own In Love and War series. Over in fantasy, Conan, Solomon Kane and many other sword and sorcery characters (including my own Thurvok) are also variations on this theme.

But this story pattern is much older and goes back to the questing knights errant of medieval legend.  And the reasons it continues to be popular is because it works and allows to tell a nigh endless variety of stories, as the protagonist solves someone else’s problem and moves on to the next adventure and the next. It doesn’t matter whether there is a fixed goal to the protagonist’s quest as with Dr. Richard Kimble from The Fugitive or The A-Team or whether there isn’t, as with Jack Reacher. The protagonist will always move on to new adventures or new stories. And the Star Wars universe offers endless possibilities for new adventures for Baby Yoda and his Mandalorian Dad.

 

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Star Trek Discovery pays a visit to the “People of the Earth”

Welcome back to my episode by episode review of Star Trek Discovery. My takes on previous episodes may be found here.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

“People of the Earth” opens with a brief flashback of what happened to Michael during the year she waited for Discovery to arrive. In order to learn more about whatever happened to the Federation and Starfleet and what exactly caused “the burn”, Michael became a courier, working both alone as well as with Book. We learn all this from a log recording that Michael makes for Discovery, whenever she will arrive, wherein she also confesses that she fears she will never see the Discovery and her crew again. We also nicely see Michael’s hair grow steadily longer as time passes until she has the awesome cornrows she wears now. The brief flashback ends with Michael and Book (and Grudge) together, laughing and clearly comfortable with each other, when Michael’s ancient Starfleet communicator begins to beep.

Now this episode continues exactly where last week’s episode left off, with Michael and the Discovery finally reunited. As Michael beams aboard, she is met by Tilly, Saru, Stamets and the bridge crew, which leads to a massive group hug. Indeed, there is a lot of hugging in this episode, which I quite liked, though AV Club reviewer Zack Handlen didn’t.

Empress Philippa the Merciless isn’t one for hugging – too undignified. Nonetheless, she skulks around in the background, as relieved as anybody else to have Michael back. And unlike everybody else, Philippa is actually pleased that Michael has changed, has become tougher and more independent in her year away. Oh yes, and Georgiou has promoted herself to admiral, too. Michelle Yeoh is always a delight and Philippa Georgiou, Empress of the Universe, in Mama Bear mode is brilliant. iO9 reviewer James Whitbrook clearly agrees with me.

Book gets a taste of Georgiou’s protectiveness, when he beams aboard Discovery and promptly finds himself faced with Georgiou (rather than Tilly or Dettmer, as Michael promised) who proceeds to interogate him with regard to his intentions towards Michael. Book remains charming but evasive, though he does assure Georgiou that he and Michael are not a couple, at least not yet. Cause considering the sparks flying between Michael and Book, they will get there eventually.

The reactions of the rest of the Discovery crew to Book are very telling as well. Saru is grateful for Book’s help, but wary of his intentions, not to mention jealous at the new man in Michael’s life. Meanwhile, Dettmer and Owosegun quickly decide that Michael definitely made the right choice, because Book is very handsome indeed. Book, meanwhile, is bemused at the antique vessel aboard which he finds himself, which turns to amazement, once he sees the ship’s dilithium store (Michael had promised Book some dilithium in exchange for his help). Plus, to Book’s infinite disappointment, the replicator only produces synthehol, which will give you the taste, but not the buzz. Finally, Book is also still reluctant at letting himself get drawn into Starfleet and their issues, as is evidenced by a scene where he is forced to wear a Starfleet uniform and pose as an officer. He’s clearly uncomfortable and not just because he has no idea how zippers work. David Ajala continues to be a great addition to the cast and I hope we’ll see more of him, even if he takes off alone at the end of the episode.

As soon as Michael is safely back, Saru also wants to have the captain conversation with her, but Michael tells him that of course Saru will remain captain of the Discovery. It’s absolutely the right decision and one I’m very happy with, because as I said last week, Saru makes a great captain (and Tor.com reviewer Keith R.A. DeCandido agrees with me). Whereas Michael is probably a bit too much of a Maverick to make a good captain, but more about that later.

Saru also wants Michael to be his Number One (Is this now the standard address for first officers in Starfleet? Cause so far, we have only heard Riker [who directs this episode] and Captain Pike’s still nameless first officer called that). However, Michael is hesitant, because after a year spent as a free agent, she is no longer sure, if Starfleet and Discovery are still the life she wants for herself.

Way back during season 1, I wrote that there were quite a few space operas, including season 1 of Star Trek Discovery, which made me wonder why the protagonist(s) just didn’t steal a ship and ran away to become space pirates or open a restaurant or something instead of getting involved in some intergalactic war and generally getting treated badly by others. Indeed, the In Love and War series was born out of this frustration, when I decided to write the story of two people who decided to run away from it all together, though Anjali and Mikhail did not become space pirates in the end nor have they opened a restaurant yet.

However, in science fiction – particularly space opera – characters very rarely run away from the overarching plot, even if it would be in their best interest to do so. Miles Vorkosigan does for a while, but he always comes back to Barrayar. Therefore, I found it interesting that Michael at least considers running away to become a space pirate courier. Especially since unlike season 1, where Starfleet wanted to throw her into a slave labour prison for life, Michael is actually in a good place now. She is first officer, she has a crew she likes and who like her. However, her year in the wilderness has changed her. Georgiou already noticed and so does Book.

Of course, the episode is not all character development and interaction. There is also a plot, which kicks in gear when Michael reveals that she received a transmission from a Starfleet admiral named Senna Tal, who called for all surviving Starfleet vessels to return to Earth. However, the transmission is twelve years old and Michael has no idea if Admiral Tal and the rest of what remains of Starfleet are still on Earth. And due to the chronic dilithium shortage in the 32nd century, Michael also had no opportunity to go to Earth and check for herself. How lucky that the Discovery not only has plenty of dilithium, but also the magic mushroom drive, which can take them to Earth in the blink of an eye. What about the danger to the mycellium network posed by the spore drive? Well, we forgot all about that and will continue to use the spore drive as our “Get out of jail free” card.

However, the ample dilithium supplies of the Discovery are also about to become a problem, for they make the ship a target. And since the Discovery is 900 years old, defending herself against ships with modern weapons is not going to be easy. But Michael has the perfect solution to the Discovery‘s dilemma. Store all the dilithium aboard Book’s ship (which still hasn’t aquired a name) with its handy cloaking device. Saru is not a huge fan of this plan, because he still doesn’t trust Book, but is willing to go along with it as long as Book’s ship remains in the shuttle bay of the Discovery and Book remains off his ship.  So they repair the Discovery, transfer the dilithium to Book’s ship and take off for Earth.

The Discovery reappears near Saturn and uses the impulse drive for the rest of the trip to Earth. But it’s not a happy homecoming, for once they reach Earth they promptly find themselves faced with a massive forcefield, targeted by defence systems and hailed by a woman who introduces herself as Captain N’Doye of the Earth Defence Forces. Captain N’Doye tells Discovery in no uncertain terms to get lost.

Saru is understandably confused, because he has never heard of the Earth Defence Forces. He spins a tale about how Discovery got stranded in a far off sector by the burn and has only now limped back to Earth with the descendants of the original crew on board. As for why their ship is so old, it’s a good ship, so why waste it? And besides, the Discovery only wants to check in with Starfleet headquarters.

N’Doye tells Saru that Starfleet headquarters are long gone, moved off planet, and no, she had no idea where. Admiral Tal, whose message Michael intercepted, died in an accident. Oh yes, and Earth has zero interest in rebuilding the Federation, because they’ve gone all isolationist in the meantime. I gues we could call it Earxit.

N’Doye also tells Saru that the Discovery will be boarded for an inspection to make sure they don’t have stolen or smuggled goods aboard.  Saru does not at all agree with this, but he has little choice, for as soon as N’Doye has said the words, her people beam aboard, holding everybody at phaser point and turning the ship upside down.

Michael spirits Book away to her quarters and makes him put on a Starfleet uniform, which gives her and us the chance to admire Book’s well-muscled chest. Book also clearly has issues with zippers and doesn’t like Starfleet uniforms at all.

Stamets is not at all happy to have N’Doye’s inspectors blunder all over his engine room. He also meets a young member of the Earth Defence Forces named Adira (Blu del Barrio) who asks plenty of questions and generally gives their best Wesley Crusher impression. Adira is the non-binary character whose introduction was much mentioned in the promo materials, which is why I’m using the “they” pronoun, even if Tilly uses a female pronoun. But then, pronoun stickers are apparently not a thing in the 32nd century (and why not? They would be easy to add to a badge?).

N’Doye also reveals that Earth is having trouble with a group of space pirates called the Wen who rais Earth for dilithium and other supplies. As if on cue, the Wen show up and hail Discovery. Their leader, a being in an insect-like helmet, demands that Discovery hand over all her dilithium. N’Doye orders her people to fire upon the Wen. Saru lets her know in no uncertain terms that she has no authority on his ship and that there will be no shooting at anybody on his watch.

The stand-off becomes more tense when it turns out that N’Doye’s people cannot beam from board, because the Discovery is surrounded by some kind of forcefield which messes with their personal transporters. N’Doye accuses Saru of being behind the sabotage. But the true saboteur is found much closer to home. For in the engine room, Stamets and Tilly find a mysterious device that Adira installed and deduce that they are the saboteur. However, Adira has vanished.

Meanwhile, Michael and Book work out a cunning plan to deal with the raiders without massive bloodshed. However, Michael – back to her Maverick ways of season 1 – neglects to inform Saru about her cunning plan, most likely because she knows he wouldn’t agree. “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than get permission,” she tells Book. I have no idea where that quote comes from – Wikipedia attributes it to an impressive lady named Admiral Grace Hopper – but I mainly associate it with Leroy Jethro Gibbs from NCIS, who quotes Admiral Hopper a lot. So my first reaction was, “Oh no, don’t tell me that NCIS is still going on the the 23rd century, now headed by a hologram of Gibbs and an immortal Hetty Lang.” However, I suspect Michael was quoting Admiral Hopper rather than Gibbs, if only because Star Trek, for all its attempts to be global, is still very US focussed and clearly expects the rest of the world to know American historical figures like Admiral Hopper.

Some people have issues with Michael being a Maverick, but I think it actually fits the character as she has been portrayed. For Michael’s illustrious little brother Spock is a very similar character. Spock is deeply loyal to the Enterprise and her crew,  but he also does what he thinks is right, considers orders merely suggestions and often neglects to inform Kirk or Pike about his cunning plan. Spock also tends to nerve-pinch superior officers, when they are in the way. And oddly enough, hardly anybody complains about Spock being a Maverick, whereas plenty of people complain about Michael.

Michael’s and Book’s cunning plans involves sneaking aboard Book’s ship and taking it and all the dilithium out of the shuttle bay (the episode glosses over just how Michael manages to do this, but then I suspect she has the command codes). Then they call the raiders and tell them, “We stole all the Discovery‘s dilithium and now you’re negotiating with us.”

Saru has no idea what Michael’s plan is, but he trusts her enough to know that she has one.  N’Doye doesn’t help matters at all and orders her ship to fire on the raiders and Book’s ship. Now Saru decides to put the Discovery between Book’s ship and N’Doye’s people and absorb the shot. Dettmer, who is still shaken by the crash last episode, is not at all happy with this order, but eventually obeys. The Discovery survives the shots of N’Doye’s people, though her shields are down and she suffers some damage. Meanwhile, Michael tells the raiders that if they want to negotiate, they’d better do it now, because the Discovery cannot take another shot.

The raiders agree and lower their shields, while Book cloaks his ship. Meanwhile, on the bridge of Discovery, Saru and N’Doye note that the raiders are also powering down their weapons. A moment later, Michael and Book enter the bridge, dragging along the clearly reluctant raider captain. Once the raiders lowered their shields, they beamed aboard and took the raider captain prisoner. Sadly, we do not get to see this scene.

Saru and Michael now force N’Doye and the raider captain to talk to each other and resolve their differences peacefully. Michael also tears off the raider captain’s helmet, revealing a somewhat bedraggled looking human. N’Doye is shocked, for she had no idea that her raiders were human. The raider captain reveals that he and his people are from a research colony on Titan, which had declared itself independent from Earth a century ago (Titanexit?). The colony did fine, until disaster struck and destroyed many of their habitats. Though I don’t find it very believable that Earth had no idea that the people on Titan were suffering, because Titan is a moon of Saturn. We have space probes and telescopes which can easily observe Titan even in the 21st century. And yet the hyper-advanced Earth of the 32nd century can’t even be bothered to observe what’s going on in its own solar system? Or maybe the “Earth first” types of the 32nd century just didn’t care.

The colony asked Earth for help, but Earth didn’t respond. So the Titan colonists became space pirates out of desperation, because the people of Earth are jerks and just hoard dilithium they don’t need. Saru and Michael broker an agreement and an exchange of dilithium and information between the two former enemies. Of course, N’Doye is very likely not authorised to make such decisions and the raider captain probably isn’t either. But it’s Star Trek and overly simplified conflict resolution has always been a trait of the series.

In his review, Camestros Felapton notes that “People of the Earth” feels a lot more like Star Trek than the previous two episodes and that it plays out almost like an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, down to the fact that Jonathan Frakes a.k.a. Will Riker himself is directing. He is right, too, except that rather blunt moral messages and overly pat conflict resolutions are not just a Next Generation thing, they’re a Star Trek thing. And so the original series had plenty of episodes with clumsy moral messages and very tidy solutions. See “Let that be your last battlefield” (a.k.a. the one with the people with the black and white faces) or “The Omega Glory” (a.k.a. the one with the Yangs and the Koms) or “A Private Little War” (this one has Klingons) or even “Arena” (a.k.a. the one with Gorn), which was actually an improvement on the “genocide is good” story upon which it was based. Blunt moral message in favour of collaboration rather than conflict and against isolationism have always been a feature of Star Trek. Just as “Talking to each other makes everything better” has always been a feature of Star Trek. Discovery is clearly following in those footsteps.

And even though the solution to the central dilemma of “People of the Earth” is a little too neat and easy, I personally don’t mind Discovery doing a typical Star Trek solution complete with blunt moral messaging once in a while. And “People of the Earth” manages to be less eye-rolly than some of the moral message episodes listed above.

With the conflict resolved, N’Doye allows the Discovery crew to visit Earth. And so Tilly and the bridge crew end up on the grounds of what was once Starfleet academy and find an old tree still standing that had already been there when they were cadets. Even more amazingly, the Golden Gate Bridge is still standing as well – more than 1250 years after it was built.

Michael and Saru have a heart to heart about Michael’s unauthorised decision. It’s a nice scene which shows how far these two characters have come in trusting each other compared to season 1. Michael also accepts Saru’s invitation to become his Number One, while Book and Grudge take off for parts unknown.

Meanwhile, Stamets has finally tracked down Adira, who has crawled into a Jeffries tube. The usually grumpy Stamets tells Adira that he knows they are behind the sabotage and also tells them about the magic mushrookm drive and that he is the human navigator. In turn, Adira opens up as well and reveals that they only sabotaged the transporters, so they could spend more time aboard Discovery, because they have been waiting for a Starfleet vessel to finally show up. Adira also wishes to join the crew and reveals that they know where to find Admiral Tal. For it turns out that Admiral Tal was a Trill. And upon his death, his symbiont transferred to Adira. Except that Adira cannot access all of Tal’s memories, since they are human rather than Trill.

Of course, Starfleet will not encounter the Trill and their symbionts until The Next Generation well after Discovery‘s time. But the infodump sphere nicely gives Saru and Michael the required information about how Trill symbionts work. And as we already know from The Next Generation, Trill symbionts can survive in human bodies, though it’s not an ideal solution.

I have to admit I’m not quite sure what to make of Adira yet. The fact that they are non-binary is not so revolutionary, when they’re a Trill, because Trill are non-binary by default and don’t give a fuck about gender identity. I also see a risk of Adira becoming a Wesley Crusher type know-it-all, but then many of the issues with Wesley were due to bad writing. not to mention, as Camestros Felapton points out, that Discovery already has a lot of characters, several of which (the bridge crew) are underdeveloped, so do we really need another main character? On the other hand, I enjoyed seeing grumpy Stamets bonding with Adira and I can see Stamets and Culber making good adoptive parents for Adira. So I guess we’ll see what they do with the character.

All in all, this was an enjoyable episode, though not quite up to the standards of the first two of the season. The moral message was rather blunt and the solution overly simple, but then it’s Star Trek and sometimes, Star Trek‘s just gonna Star Trek.

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Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for October 2020

It’s that time of the month again, time for “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie and small press authors (as well as the occasional Big 5 book) newly published this month, though some September books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. This month, we have urban fantasy, epic fantasy, historical fantasy, dark fantasy, young adult fantasy, paranormal mysteries, paranormal romance, science fiction romance, space opera, military science fiction, young adult science fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, dystopian fiction, biopunk, agripunk, time travel, weird western, historical horror, gothic horror, humorous horror, vampires, demons, dragons, dinosaurs, ghosts, zombies, gods, androids, alien invasions, interstellar wars, space marines, superheroes, renegades, crime-busting witches, crime-busting psychics and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a group blog run by Jessica Rydill and myself, which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

Gunmetal Gods by Zamil Akhtar:

They took his daughter, so Micah comes to take their kingdom. Fifty thousand gun-toting paladins march behind him, all baptized in angel blood, thirsty to burn unbelievers.

Only the janissaries can stand against them. Their living legend, Kevah, once beheaded a magus amid a hail of ice daggers. But ever since his wife disappeared, he spends his days in a haze of hashish and poetry.

To save the kingdom, Kevah must conquer his grief and become the legend he once was. But Micah writes his own legend in blood, and his righteous conquest will stop at nothing.

When the gods choose sides, a legend will be etched upon the stars.

Azalea Avenue by Cora Buhlert:

1956: On the surface, Rosemary Wilson is a happily married wife and mother, enjoying a perfect life in the quiet suburb of Shady Groves. But the house on Azalea Avenue harbours a dark secret, for Rosemary’s husband Don is an abusive drunk, who vents his frustrations on Rosemary and their three children.

After nine years of abuse, Rosemary finally decides to leave Don. But her plans of escape are interrupted, first by Don coming home early from a weekend hunting trip and then by the appearance of a flying saucer from outer space in the sky above Shady Groves…

This is a novelette of 10400 words or approx. 38 pages in the The Day the Saucers Came… series, but may be read as a standalone.

Content warning for domestic violence.

Appletree Court by Cora Buhlert:

1956: Bernie Stetson is a burglar, robbing suburban homes while their owners are not at home.

Bernie’s latest raid takes him to the subdivision of Shady Groves. But things quickly go wrong. First, the house Bernie is robbing turns out to be not as deserted as he thought. And then, a flying saucer from outer space appears in the sky above Shady Groves…

This is a short story of 3600 words or approx. 14 print pages in the The Day the Saucers Came… series, but may be read as a standalone.

Willowbrook Farm by Cora Buhlert:

1956: The elderly farmer couple Bob and Mary Graham are crushed by debt and about to lose the family farm to a greedy developer.

But on the day they are supposed to be evicted, a flying saucer from outer space appears in the sky above Willowbrook Farm…

This is a short story of 2700 words or approx. 10 print pages in the The Day the Saucers Came… series, but may be read as a standalone.

The Ghosts of Doodenbos by Cora Buhlert:

The Netherlands in the year of the Lord 1571: The young widow Ann lives alone with her little son Florentijn in a house at the edge of the woods.

From childhood on, Ann has been told to never ever go alone into the woods. But when her little son runs away, Ann has no choice. She must venture into the forest to save Florentijn from the creatures that live in the woods surrounding the village of Doodenbos.

This is a historical horror short story of 3000 words or approx. 12 pages.

Puncture Wounds by Cora Buhlert:

Every morning, Brett finds blood on his sheets and mysterious puncture wounds on his body. But as he tries to trap the “night pricker”, as he calls his unseen assailant, he’s in for a surprise…

The house at Green Corner has been standing there for fifty years now, surrounded by a tall fence and even taller hedges. And at dawn, bats flutter around the overgrown garden. No one has ever seen the owner of the house, let alone spoken to them. But early one morning, paper girl Maddie decides to venture beyond the tall hedges on a dare and finds something very unexpected…

Two modern vampire tales by Hugo finalist Cora Buhlert of 5000 words or approx. 18 print pages altogether.

Demon Summoning for Beginners by Cora Buhlert:

When observing a magical ritual in the woods, make sure to take precautions…

If you try to summon a demon to grant you your heart’s fondest desire, you’d better get your Latin right…

When studying ancient grimoires, it’s never a good idea to actually read the contents out loud or you might just cause the end of the world…

Following your grandma’s heirloom recipe might just conjure up something other than marinara sauce…

Four short humorous horror tales of rituals gone very wrong by Hugo finalist Cora Buhlert of 5800 words or approx. 20 print pages altogether.

Rhonda Wray, Raptor Wrangler by Charon Dunn and Sally Smith:

Rhonda Wray: Raptor Wrangler is about a teenage girl who was innocently trying to listen to some live music … her favorite boy band happened to be playing a festival on a dinosaur planet … when bad things suddenly happened. Now she and her trusty robot are all alone in the wilderness, picking up survival skills and looking for her favorite singer, Sebastian Rose, just in case he needs to be rescued.

There’s hard science, explosions, plenty of dinosaurs (with feathers), diversity, no sex (although there are a few references to it), less violence than many dinosaur stories, cliffhangers galore, and a little bogus science just to honor the fine tradition of speculative fiction (what if raptors had syrinxes and could sing like birds?).

Blood Succession by Rachel Ford:

A new queen. An ancient feud. A succession bought in blood.

The world changed in the blink of an eye. Once an estranged cousin to the king, Aria is now heir apparent to the South. With her nation still in the midst of an unjust war, torn by Byzantine politics and rampant treachery, the inheritance seems a curse. Not least of all because peacemaking between the distant branches of the royal family means marriage: her marriage.

Among the sycophants and assassins, politicians and spies, Aria knows who to trust: no one. She doesn’t trust her intended, Augustus. She doesn’t trust his smart talking half-sister, Terese. But when the young woman saves her life, the queen’s guard begins to slip.

Which is a problem. Because if she crosses the rest of the royal family, it won’t just be a war with the North she’ll have to contend with; it’ll be civil war.

Dryker’s Stand by Chris Fox:

Humanity’s First Interstellar War

Earth has had a year to recover from their first clash with the savage Tigris. A year they have put to incredible use. Over thirty vessels have been outfitted with the new Helios Drives, which allow them to enter our sun and emerge elsewhere in the galaxy, as the cats did when they attacked us.

For the first time we can take the fight to them.

Commander Dryker, now of the U.F.C, serves as first officer aboard the very first vessel to be retrofitted, the UFC Johnston. His mission…explore the six target worlds where they believe ancient Primo tech can be recovered. Without it mankind is doomed to a protracted war of attrition with a superior foe.

Meanwhile, Pride Leonis has never been in so precarious a position. Mighty Fizgig must aid the man she most hates in his rise to power, or risk her people’s ultimate destruction. Doing so will cost her everything, but make her a legend in the eyes of her people.

Unbeknownst to either the insidious Void Wraith are quietly returning, and preparing the next Eradication.

The Bison Agenda by Aaron Frale:

Clara has it all, a swanky new job, a hot robot babe, and even a time machine. Paradise all comes crashing down when she realizes her ticket to the future was stolen.

She wakes up in a world that has been reshaped by the whim of a time traveler with a strange obsession with bison and chicken wings. Now she has to fix the timeline, or everyone she knows and loves will be wiped from existence.

There’s also a lot of flightless birds.

Find out how it all fits together in The Bison Agenda, the not anticipated sequel of Time Burrito.

[image error] Admiral Wolf by C. Gockel:

To protect the human race, 6T9 evolved with the flip of a switch and a few lines of code.

But he’s made himself a killer as well as a protector. The programming that may save humanity has driven him from Volka, the woman he loves. In the heart of the Dark’s first strike against the Republic, 6T9 must discover what he has become, who he wants to be, and who he wants to be with.

Slowly and almost unnoticed, Volka has been evolving, too. Heartbroken by 6T9’s departure, she is torn between love and duty. Accepting the latter, she takes a mission that will lead her to the edge of the universe. There, she will be tested, and her evolution will pass a point where there will be no turning back.

An android who has become more than a sex ‘bot, a mutant who has developed startling abilities, 6T9 and Volka have become more than human. The changes they’ve endured may save the galaxy, but have driven them further apart.

Will they find a way forward together, or will the bond between them wind up another casualty of the Dark?

The Judgment of Valene by Darby Harn:

Wealth. Privilege. Superpowers. Valene has it all… except any mercy from the person trying to kill her.

For the first time in her life, Valene Blackwood has peace. She’s been aboard her own private space station for a year, removed from the sonic duress of the world that she suffers due to her superhuman ability to hear everything, everywhere. When her father dies, she must return and take over the family business – selling superhuman protection for profit.

With her father gone, challengers emerge for control of Great Power. Valene is young, unproven, and wanting only to go back to her sanctuary in the sky. She struggles to stay focused, knowing the future of the company is at stake. The future of the Empowered. Before she has a chance to get her feet on the ground, someone tries to kill her.

Advanced technology nearly rips Valene right out of her own skin. Technology only one person in the world could have invented: the woman she left behind by going up to the space station. Kit Baldwin. But Kit is a hero. Is someone setting her up? Is someone trying to ruin them both?

Valene sets out to find the truth, and for the first time in her life, she has to listen. She has to stay in the world. She has to be the hero she never wanted to be.

If she can survive.

Vengeance of the Black Rose by A.W. Hart:

LINA MUST AGAIN PUT ON HER MASK AND ASSUME HER IDENTITY AS THE BLACK ROSE.

The Black Rose discovers that a small mission on the border of Texas and Mexico has been raided by someone locals call “The Beast.”

Many are dead but most of the women and children are missing. The trail of the kidnappers leads the Black Rose into Mexico, into a hidden valley where “The Beast” is raising an army to restore the Aztec Empire. “The Beast,” known by his followers as “El Tigre,” is human but something of a physical mutant whose face resembles that of a Jaguar.

The Black Rose will face an army with only a good sword arm and a fast gun between her and death for them all on a bloody altar.

Dances With Witches by Lily Harper Hart:

Hannah Hickok is struggling. After the death of one of her workers, a woman who had been making life difficult, Hannah finds she is awash in a myriad of feelings she can’t quite put a name to. Things don’t get better when, following a romantic dinner with her boyfriend Cooper Wyatt, magic and mechanics collide in a multi-vehicle accident that looks to have been caused by a dark shadow. One of the survivors, a young teenager, could be shuffled into the system if someone doesn’t step up.

Sheriff Boone is the one who swoops in and brings the girl home, but all is not well. It seems something dark is chasing the girl, and it’s not of the human variety.

Hannah doesn’t know much – her knowledge as a witch is still growing – but she’s certain she needs to help the girl. It won’t be as easy as she hopes, though, because dark clouds are brewing and more than one storm is about to descend.

Hannah couldn’t save her employee and she’s haunted. She vows this girl will be different, even if she has to sacrifice herself to keep her safe.

Casper Creek has a long and storied past and old players are about to become new threats. Saddle up, because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Hyperia Jones and the Olive Branch Caper by David M. Kelly:

The Hype is real!

Hyperia Jones is at the top of her game, and she knows it. By day, a glamorous pro-rasseler who dominates the TwistCube world of FIRE–the Federation of Interstellar Rassling Entertainment. By night, the daring, resourceful, and entirely unscrupulous Tekuani, master thief.

But when the law catches up with her unexpectedly, she’s forced to accept a dangerous mission working for the very people who’ve been trying to catch her for years, and steal evidence against a powerful drug smuggling operation that reaches deep into the elite levels of Seventeen Realms society.

Now it’s a battle on all fronts. Hyperia must put everything on the line and decide what means the most to her: the lives of her fellow rasslers or her freedom.

The Plot Against Heaven by Mark Kirkbride:

Hell-bent on confronting God after the death of wife Kate, Paul gate-crashes Heaven. With immigration problems and a wall, Heaven turns out to be nowhere near as welcoming as expected. Both Heaven and Hell are modern and militarized, and the cold war that exists between them is about to heat up, with him in the middle of it. Caught on the wrong side of Heaven, Paul faces an impossible choice if he’s to have any hope of seeing his wife again.

Death doesn’t stand a chance against love.

 

[image error] Medici of Ackbarr by Erme Lander:

“The men go mad eventually – unable to separate themselves from the cats they control. The women? They fare little better…”

The words from Lin’s journal haunt Mika as she gains her Medici qualifications. Left homeless by his death, she tries to escape her grief by burying herself in her work, only to discover both old and new enemies waiting in the wings.

The events in this book take place about five years after those in “Blood Lore”, Book Two of The Medici Chronicles.

A Dark Infection by Erme Lander:

A voice in the dark, “You have taken my Consort. You’ll give her up and take me instead, Kalmár.”

It has been ten years since Tina was kidnapped by Kalmár and she has settled into the twilight world of vampires and their pets. However circumstances and her own body are changing faster than she realises, leaving her vulnerable to those who would take advantage.

A different reality intrudes as she stumbles across her daughter, now a young woman, forcing her to make hard choices between the two worlds, both inimical to each other. To survive she must gamble with those most precious to her, while fighting to keep her both her sanity and humanity intact.

Caffeinated Calamity by Amanda M. Lee:

The only witch in the world? It might feel like it to Stormy Morgan but she knows better.

Twenty minutes away, in a town called Hemlock Cove, witches have taken over. Sure, the bulk of the town is made up of frauds looking to shore up their tourism industry, but there are real witches, too. There’s a family, last name of Winchester, and they’re notorious. Stormy wants to meet them but she has a myriad of problems darkening her doorstep.

The first is Hunter Ryan, her childhood love who is back in her life and ready to take the next step, which is formal dating … just as soon as he’s given proper respect to his previous relationship. While Stormy is waiting for that to happen, she runs to the aid of customer at the family diner when the older woman collapses as she’s leaving after breakfast. Before Stormy can offer even a dollop of help, though, the woman is dead and there are more questions than answers.

When the cause of death is determined to be poison, Stormy and Hunter have to follow a tangled trail of clues … and it leads them straight to the senior center. It seems the victim was a regular visitor there, and one of the better euchre players at the lauded weekly tournaments. Is that a motive for murder, though?

Stormy has her hands full with out-of-control euchre madness, magic she is trying to control, and hormones that are threatening to run rampant. When she finally makes it to Hemlock Cove, her nerves threaten to get the best of her.

She needs help. This is a world she doesn’t understand. The truth has to come out, but is she ready? It might not matter because a murderer has marked Stormy for death. It’s up to her and her motley crew of friends and family to save the day … if they can all come together as a team.

That will be easier said than done.

Of Fury and Fangs by Kyoko M.:

Someone wants Dr. Rhett “Jack” Jackson dead.

After surviving a vicious attack from a dragon in his own home, Jack and Dr. Kamala Anjali investigate who sent the dragon to kill him. Unfortunately, their list of enemies is long. Plenty of people have an axe to grind with the two scientists responsible for the rebirth of the previously extinct dragons that are now flourishing on every continent of the planet. Jack and Kamala rejoin with their team at the Knight Division to hunt down the culprit and put an end to their revenge scheme once and for all.

But will it cost them everything?

Of Fury and Fangs is the fourth novel in the Amazon and USA Today bestselling Of Cinder and Bone series, following Of Cinder and Bone, Of Blood and Ashes, and Of Dawn and Embers.

[image error] Refuge by Jessica Marting:

Brother Rordan came to at a monks’ temple with no memory of who he was or where he’d been, and he’s content to leave his forgotten life in the past. All that matters is his future as a monk in service to the all-knowing stars.

Dasha Caron crash-landing at his temple changes everything for him: she makes him question his beliefs and monk’s lifestyle. She also brings the devastating news that he’s really a cyborg, and he has a price on his head.

 

Demon Prints by Nazri Noor:

What if the chosen one was kind of a dirtbag?

Quilliam J. Abernathy is the Chosen of Asmodeus, destined to become demonkind’s greatest weapon against heaven and humanity. Honing his arcane gifts in both modern California and the depths of hell, Quill is a prideful, powerful sorcerer, his magic surging with every tome he adds to his arcane collection.

But a botched mission incurs Asmodeus’s wrath, and Quill is stripped of his sorcery, protections, even his beloved books. Oh, and a duo of deadly angels wants him dead, too. Quill must decide. Either obey Asmodeus, reclaim his magic, and embody the apocalypse… or rebel against hell.

Spoiler alert: We’re doomed either way.

Demon Prints is the first adventure in the Infernal Inheritance urban fantasy series, set in the same universe as Darkling Mage and Sins of the Father. Witness Quilliam’s unholy ascent in an intense supernatural suspense series filled with demons, devilry, and danger.

Darkspace Renegade by G.J. Ogden:

The interstellar bridges provide a lifeline for billions.

To save humanity the Darkspace Renegades must tear them all down.

Unjustly kicked out of the Consortium Security Force, Hallam Knight has been reduced to working as a gunner, defending the precious Randenite fuel tankers from notorious extremists, the Darkspace Renegades.

Hell-bent on ending bridge travel for good, the Darkspace Renegades threaten to tear down the interstellar travel network that supports billions of lives, across a dozen worlds.

The Darkspace Renegades are outlaws and radicals. Or so Hallam thought.

When a violent encounter with infamous mercenary group, the Blackfire Squadron, almost costs him his life, Hallam Knight finds himself at the mercy of the Darkspace Renegades and their mysterious and enigmatic leader.

Hallam Knight discovers that everything he thought he knew was a lie. Far from being the enemy, the Darkspace Renegades are humanity’s only hope – they just don’t know it yet.

The Consortium taught Hallam that no good deed goes unpunished. They’re about to find out that karma’s a bitch.

The Acheron by Rick Partlow:

Sandi and Ash never set out to be heroes.

She joined the Fleet to please her mother, the Admiral.

He signed up to escape the grinding poverty of the Housing Blocks.

And the unlikely friends envisioned boring, peacetime careers as shuttle pilots. The Tahni Imperium had other ideas…

Caught in the desperate fury of the Battle for Mars, the two young pilots wind up the last defense against an alien armada, but their war is just beginning. Recruited to fly the Fleet’s newest weapon in this new war, they take the fight deep into the heart of the Imperium and battle not just against the enemy but against incompetent leadership and ineffectual tactics.

Can the unconventional strategies of a pair of hotshot young pilots change the course of the war? And when the time comes that a choice has to be made between duty to command and loyalty to a friend, which of the two will be willing to make one last flight alone…

[image error] Ghost Dance by Christine Pope:

An angel has returned to Paris. But is it the Angel of Music…or Death?

Two years have passed since Christine fled the opera house, put the memories and the horror behind her. And yet, in her dreams, she still hears his voice, feels his moth-light touch on her throat.

The rumors involving the legendary Opera Ghost are merely newspaper sensationalism. The Opera Ghost is dead. His tragic life, his epic opera, his obsession with her voice…ended. But with a slow, heart-pounding dread, Christine lets a lie slip from her lips, and heads for Paris. Alone. Because she has to know if Erik is dead. Or if he’s alive…and wreaking his vengeance.

Inheritance by Joyce Reynolds-Ward:

YOU CAN’T ESCAPE THE INHERITANCE OF THE PAST…OR CAN YOU?

Rancher Ruby Barkley and her ex-husband Gabe Ramirez are competing head-to-head for the AgInnovator game show’s new one-shot award, the Ag Superhero. The winner walks away with $3.75 million per year for five years, with no accountability or need to re-earn the Superhero, unlike the Innovator’s other awards.

But issues beyond those raised by their long-ago acrimonious divorce face Ruby and Gabe. Fence cutting. Rogue biobots destructively ranging beyond programmed parameters. Physical attacks. And the realization that they may need to reunite to save their son Brandon from indentured servitude.

Then the secret shadow of Gabe’s hidden inheritance reveals itself. Will he step up to the Martiniere Legacy—and what role will Ruby accept in any future they may share?

The Legacy of Tomorrow by Audrey Sharpe:

Her strength is her greatest weakness.

Protecting others has always been Aurora Hawke’s defining characteristic — until a fierce battle with her mortal enemy creates devastating results, proving she’s more weapon than human.

Haunted by apocalyptic visions of her future and pursued by the ghosts of her past, she makes the only logical decision.

Run.

Abandoning her ship and crew goes against everything she holds dear, but it’s the only way to safeguard those she loves from the greatest threat of all — herself.

Shadows of the Fall by Glynn Stewart:

Fifty thousand years ago, the Precursors broke the universe.

Now great powers and small alike fight over their wreckage.

But in the midst of the chaos, there is a question no one asks…

Why?

Morgan Casimir, commander of the A!Tol Imperial cruiser Defiant, has seen the works of the Precursor aliens known as the Alava. She has seen their accidents threaten worlds and consume entire star fleets.

Charged by her Empress to prevent a conspiracy of profiteers from finding and using a lost fleet of Alava warships, she knows unimaginable catastrophe looms if she fails. With her lover, xenoarcheologist Dr. Rin Dunst, at her side, she is sent to a hot zone on the edge of war to once again achieve the impossible.

But as they search along a border flaring in violence, Morgan discovers that if the worst comes to pass, her orders are to destroy the ships rather than allow them to be taken…and she realizes that there just might be a reason seemingly godlike aliens lost an entire fleet.

Triton: The Descendants War by John Walker:

Commander Titus Barnes struggles to save his ship.

War brews on the horizon and the crew of the TCN Triton get caught in the middle. When they answer a distress call from one of their colonies on the edge of their space, they end up outmatched and outgunned by an unknown force. This conflict may well push humanity into a new age…or spell the beginning of the end for their race.

Meanwhile, two archaeologists work to uncover evidence of alien life on a far off planet. As they make what might be the biggest discovery of the human race, their activities trigger an alert, drawing dangerous forces to investigate. Cut off from any quick help and on their own, they must use every trick at their disposal to stay alive.

Into the White by Daniel Willcocks:

If the storm must taketh, it must surely giveth, too?

Their numbers are dwindling, the storm shows no sign of relenting. Yet, at the edge of the Drumtrie Forest, a strange phenomenon is occurring: dozens of the pale white beasts standing guard.

Over what?

Cody is gone; missing in the white. Tori has reunited with her sister, but it wasn’t the celebration she planned. Karl is lost to the wants and desires of the Masked Ones.

And, from out of the storm, comes a stranger who may hold all the answers to unravelling the mystery once and for all…

If the wendigos will let her.

Geek Fire by Mel Woodburn:

Honors student, Emma Edgin, never thought she’d be a superhero, but she never thought she’d fail a class or be diagnosed autistic either.

After a strange craft flies over the West Coast, Emma sneezes a fireball and starts flying.

Emma doesn’t want to be a hero. She’s got to focus on passing English and keeping the new Super Commission agent from noticing her.

Too bad so many people need saving.

Geek Fire is the first novel in the Dragon Girl Series. If you like nerdy heroes and conspiracies, then you’ll love this series!

Web of Nightmares by P.D. Workman:

Psychic Reg Rawlins is hoping to get her life back to normal, or some semblance of it. With the gems she was given by the fairies for saving Calliopia’s life, she doesn’t need to worry about money. Maybe never again. She can just relax, get the sleep she needs, and not have to worry about hustling a living.

Life is better with money. Maybe she’ll even take up a hobby. Travel. Visit Erin.

But the rest of the world seems to have other ideas. Reg senses that all is not well in Black Sands. She is plagued by nightmares and visions, but her ability to consciously access her powers is limited.

A fun, full-length paranormal cozy mystery with a captivating cat, drop-dead gorgeous warlock, and magical races as you’ve never read them before.

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Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for October 2020

Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of crime fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some September books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, small town mysteries, historical mysteries, Victorian mysteries, Jazz Age mysteries, paranormal mysteries, police procedurals, crime thrillers, adventure thrillers, action thrillers, psychological thrillers, domestic thrillers, western thrillers, military thrillers, police officers, amateur sleuths, private investigators, ex-Navy SEALs, organised crime, kidnapping, crime-busting witches, crime-busting socialites, crime-busting realtors, crime-busting psychics, environmental disasters and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things crime fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

A Thread of Madness by Blythe Baker:

A sudden death uncovers a string of secrets in a small village…

When seamstresses Iris and Lily Dickinson are accidental witnesses to a murder, the spinster sisters resolve to keep themselves – and their pristine reputations – a discreet distance away from the sordid business. But the unexpected discovery that the killer might be in their very midst soon changes everything, sparking an urgent desperation to ferret out his identity.

While assisting the local constable in his investigation, Iris stumbles across a family mystery of her own, a buried secret that calls into question everything she thinks she knows about her sister. With Iris’s once-blind faith in Lily shaken, can the sisters unite long enough to escape the schemes of a dangerous lunatic?

Betrayed Heroes by Gregg Bell:

The US president’s seven-year-old nephew has been kidnapped. The nation is horrified, but the crime turns out to be just the break that disgraced former Navy SEALs Shelby Ryder and Earl Bernstein need. If they’re able to rescue the boy, who’s being held somewhere in the Florida Everglades, the president assures them he’ll restore their SEAL trident pins.

But something’s not right.

Support people don’t show. Others won’t reveal their names. Many seem more mercenary than military. Shelby and Earl are suspicious, but they’re desperate to be SEALs again, and there’s a boy out there in need of rescue. And so, into the depths of the humid, alligator-infested Everglades they venture, to start a mission they were never intended to survive.

[image error] The Wicked Fringe of Mystery by Beth Byers:

November 1925

Severine DuNoir has discovered who has been hunting her. Now she needs to discover why. As the foes circle each other, their friends and family get drawn into the conflict.

Just who can Severine trust? How can she stop him? And what will happen to those she loves if she fails? She’s all too afraid the answer is one she won’t be able to live with.

 

Corridor Man: Bye Bye Bobby by Mike Faricy:

Things are about to change…

– Bobby Custer is looking to take the organization in a new direction.

– He just has to get everyone on board.

– No better way to do it than with rewards!

– Of course there are some loose ends…

– People who don’t want to change!

– People who secretly question Bobby’s decisions!

It’s an exhausting time! BYE BYE BOBBY!

Deadly Pursuit by Elle Gray:

Tick. Tock… The clock is ticking.

Time is running out for Paxton Arrington.

The choice he must make could be the difference between life and death.

Paxton Arrington had an upbringing of wealth and privilege. Rather than live the life of a corporate CEO, Paxton chose to become one of Seattle’s finest. He’s a man with a rigid and unyielding personality and a belief of always doing the right thing.

When he stumbles onto corruption in his own precinct, Paxton finds himself in a precarious position with no simple way out of it.

Going head to head with Detective Sergeant Radley and his highly decorated Strike Team is career suicide. More than that, he fears that taking them on could have a ripple effect of unintended consequences.

Drawn into a web of deceit and danger.

Paxton enlists his good friend, FBI Special Agent Blake Wilder to help him get the evidence he needs to bring the Strike Team down once and for all.

With forces aligning against him, Paxton must make a decision that could cost him everything.

One that will forever change his life.

Dances With Witches by Lily Harper Hart:

Hannah Hickok is struggling. After the death of one of her workers, a woman who had been making life difficult, Hannah finds she is awash in a myriad of feelings she can’t quite put a name to. Things don’t get better when, following a romantic dinner with her boyfriend Cooper Wyatt, magic and mechanics collide in a multi-vehicle accident that looks to have been caused by a dark shadow. One of the survivors, a young teenager, could be shuffled into the system if someone doesn’t step up.

Sheriff Boone is the one who swoops in and brings the girl home, but all is not well. It seems something dark is chasing the girl, and it’s not of the human variety.

Hannah doesn’t know much – her knowledge as a witch is still growing – but she’s certain she needs to help the girl. It won’t be as easy as she hopes, though, because dark clouds are brewing and more than one storm is about to descend.

Hannah couldn’t save her employee and she’s haunted. She vows this girl will be different, even if she has to sacrifice herself to keep her safe.

Casper Creek has a long and storied past and old players are about to become new threats. Saddle up, because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

The Last Resort by CeeCee James:

The mother that Stella O’Neil thought she’d lost forever is getting out of jail. Today.

Stella doesn’t know if she’s excited or terrified but one thing is for sure, everything in life feels like it’s finally settling down.

But as always in Stella’s world, nothing comes easily. When she arrives at the prison to take her mom home, she’s greeted with stunning news.

Her mother isn’t there.

Someone else picked her up.

As Stella pieces together the clues, she is more afraid than she’s ever been. She’s determined to unravel the mystery and connect the dots in order to finally connect with the mother she’s never known.

Rattlesnake Rodeo by Nick Kolakowski:

The fiery sequel to Boise Longpig Hunting Club is here…

Three nights ago, Jake Halligan and his ultra-lethal sister Frankie were kidnapped by a sadistic billionaire with a vendetta against their family. That billionaire offered them a terrible deal: Spend the next 24 hours in the backwoods of Idaho, hunted by rich men with the latest in lethal weaponry. If Jake and Frankie survived, they’d go free; otherwise, nobody would ever find their bodies.

Jake and Frankie managed to escape that terrible game, but their problems are just beginning. They’re broke, on the run, and hunted by every cop between Oregon and Montana. If they’re going to make it through, they may need to strike a devil’s bargain—and carry out a seemingly impossible crime.

Rattlesnake Rodeo is a neo-Western noir filled with incredible twists. If you want true justice against the greedy and powerful, sometimes you have no choice but to rely on the worst people…

Caffeinated Calamity by Amanda M. Lee:

The only witch in the world? It might feel like it to Stormy Morgan but she knows better.

Twenty minutes away, in a town called Hemlock Cove, witches have taken over. Sure, the bulk of the town is made up of frauds looking to shore up their tourism industry, but there are real witches, too. There’s a family, last name of Winchester, and they’re notorious. Stormy wants to meet them but she has a myriad of problems darkening her doorstep.

The first is Hunter Ryan, her childhood love who is back in her life and ready to take the next step, which is formal dating … just as soon as he’s given proper respect to his previous relationship. While Stormy is waiting for that to happen, she runs to the aid of customer at the family diner when the older woman collapses as she’s leaving after breakfast. Before Stormy can offer even a dollop of help, though, the woman is dead and there are more questions than answers.

When the cause of death is determined to be poison, Stormy and Hunter have to follow a tangled trail of clues … and it leads them straight to the senior center. It seems the victim was a regular visitor there, and one of the better euchre players at the lauded weekly tournaments. Is that a motive for murder, though?

Stormy has her hands full with out-of-control euchre madness, magic she is trying to control, and hormones that are threatening to run rampant. When she finally makes it to Hemlock Cove, her nerves threaten to get the best of her.

She needs help. This is a world she doesn’t understand. The truth has to come out, but is she ready? It might not matter because a murderer has marked Stormy for death. It’s up to her and her motley crew of friends and family to save the day … if they can all come together as a team.

That will be easier said than done.

Sorry Can’t Save You by Willow Rose:

What if you thought your husband was a murderer?

The man you loved, the man who gave you two beautiful children and a perfect life.

What if no one believed you?

Laurie Davis is the mother of two children, struggling to keep her family together since her husband, Ryan, went to war and came back changed. His PTSD is evident.

He wakes up at night, screaming in fear; he can’t stand loud noises or anyone sneaking upon him.

He even gets aggressive toward Laurie and the children. It has gotten so bad that he can no longer stay under the same roof as his family.

When a woman from his squadron is found murdered, Laurie discovers something that makes her suspect Ryan, her own husband.

But what do you do when no one believes a decorated war hero could also be a murderer?

What if you don’t want to believe it yourself?

As more people from the squadron turn up dead, by apparent suicides, Laurie digs deeper into the case.

She is risking her own life by putting it all on the line in a race against time to avoid becoming the killer’s next victim.

Bird in Hand by Nikki Stern:

In the sequel to the award-winning THE WEDDING CRASHER, Sam Tate faces off against a vengeful killer, a mistrustful boss, a shadowy nemesis, and a 300-year-old pirate.

When Arley Fitchett’s body washes up onto Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Lieutenant Sam Tate, just two months into her new job, is charged with finding out who murdered the popular guide and treasure hunter. Fitchett, she discovers, was hunting a rare carving he believed had been stolen by Chesapeake Bay pirates in 1718 and hidden nearby. No one knows if the story is true, but several locals seem to share Fitchett’s interest in the wooden bird with the sapphire eye. Any one of them could be the next victim. One of them is definitely the killer.

Rising Warrior by Wayne Stinnett:

After returning home to the Florida Keys, Jesse moves on to Fort Myers, his hometown on the Southwest Florida coast. There is much work to be done and Jesse is no stranger to hard work.

On a kayaking adventure with friends, Jesse’s daughter finds and rescues a baby manatee suffering from respiratory problems. The red tide has returned and fish are dying by the thousands, along with dolphins, manatees, sea turtles, and sea birds.

The algal bloom is a naturally occurring phenomenon, but this time it’s much worse. Theories abound; it’s something left over from the previous spring’s coronavirus outbreak, it’s caused by pollution, someone is intentionally creating a super-algae.

But there’s something far more sinister going on among the Ten Thousand Islands, and it’s up to Jesse to find out where the bodies are buried.

Fair Cronies and Felonies by Anne R. Tan:

A new director. Budget cuts. And a fire. The senior center will never be the same again.

As the new director for the senior center, Raina Sun thought organizing a few events for the geriatric crowd would be fairly easy. Until the center’s biggest donor dies in a fire, and her grandma’s arch nemesis becomes the prime suspect. As the body count piles up, Raina is drawn into another murder investigation. Can she solve the case, or will her grandma’s arch nemesis spend the rest of her golden years in prison?

Don’t miss out on the fun. Grab your copy now.

Web of Nightmares by P.D. Workman:

Psychic Reg Rawlins is hoping to get her life back to normal, or some semblance of it. With the gems she was given by the fairies for saving Calliopia’s life, she doesn’t need to worry about money. Maybe never again. She can just relax, get the sleep she needs, and not have to worry about hustling a living.

Life is better with money. Maybe she’ll even take up a hobby. Travel. Visit Erin.

But the rest of the world seems to have other ideas. Reg senses that all is not well in Black Sands. She is plagued by nightmares and visions, but her ability to consciously access her powers is limited.

A fun, full-length paranormal cozy mystery with a captivating cat, drop-dead gorgeous warlock, and magical races as you’ve never read them before.

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A Trio of Spooky New Releases and Why I Cannot Write Straight Horror

I mentioned that there would be one more new release announcement for October and here it is. It’s somewhat incomplete, because the links to Barnes & Noble are missing, since the bookseller recently suffered a cyberattack and still hasn’t managed to get their system back online two weeks later.

But first of all, I also wanted to let you know that I have two new articles up at Galactic Journey. The first one is about East and West German comics of the 1950s and 1960s. The second article is about the biggest West German movie of 1965, Winnetou III, which ends with everybody’s favourite heroic Apache chief expiring tragically in the arms of his best friend and blood brother Old Shatterhand.

But now on to the new releases. October is the spooky month, so I have three spooky new e-books to share. None of them are straight horror, because it turns out that I cannot write straight horror. Cause whenever I try to write horror, it either comes out as a parody of horror tropes or a story about trying to figure out what the spooky creature wants and how to deal with it without violence.

I’m not entirely sure why that is, especially since I grew up during the 1970s and 1980s, i.e. the heyday of the horror genre. However, I haven’t been scared by a horror movie since I was about eighteen and watched the original Nightmare on Elm Street on TV, while home alone. And even before that I haven’t been scared by horror movies all that often, if only because horror movies that were actually accessible – on TV and not in the cinema with an 18 certificate or banned altogether – were few and far between. In the three channel TV landscape of West Germany in the 1980s, horror films occasionally showed up on late night TV, but those were mostly older black and white films that relied on atmosphere more than gore. There were also the Dr. Mabuse and Edgar Wallace movies, which – though not straight horror – definitely have horror elements, but also mainly rely on atmosphere.

Meanwhile, the horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s were not at all easy to watch, if you were a teenager in Germany, because Germans are more sensitive to violence than Americans or Italians, whence those movies mostly hailed, and so any horror movie to reach our shores was either cut to ribbons or had an eighteen certificate slapped on it or both. The original Evil Dead was unavailable in Germany until a few years ago, because it was apparently too horrible for us to watch. If you had a VCR and knew someone who could rent 18+ movies, you could watch horror films, but otherwise you were out of luck. There was a moral panic about horror movie inciting teenagers to… well, I’m not entirely sure what horror movies were supposed to do to teenagers, but it was bad. One movie which came in for particular scrutiny was a 1980 Troma movie called Mother’s Day, which archieved near legendary status as a movie everybody had heard of, but almost no one had seen. And those who claimed to have seen it usually hadn’t seen it either, they simply made something up based what they’d heard. The trailer for Mother’s Day is here BTW, if you want to see what the fuss was all about.

As a result, I didn’t get to see most horror movies at the age when they would have scared me. And by the time, I finally got to see the films – once private TV had come to Germany – I was usually underwhelmed because what my mind had conjured up was usually scarier than the reality. Not to mention that a lot of horror movie tropes are rather silly, especially since most of those movies were made for a very different cultural context. People in Germany simply weren’t particularly bothered about teenagers having – gasp – sex, while camping in the woods, and certainly didn’t think this was a crime worth killing people for.

However, I also had issues even with those horror movies – usually more traditional vampire, ghost and monster fare – that I actually was able watch. For quite often, I found myself sympathising with the supernatural creature. One movie I remember infuriating me was House of Dark Shadows, a 1970 spin-off of the US horror soap opera Dark Shadows. In the movie, a young woman gets bitten and turned by Barnabas Collins. She is buried and returns as a vampire, bites someone and then several members of her own family hold her down, while someone stakes her. This scene absolutely infuriated me, because the young woman had been these people’s daughter, girlfriend, sister and yet they murdered her in cold blood. And besides, it wasn’t her fault that she was a vampire and that she was hungry. Surely it would be possible for her to live on blood donations.

Other films elicited similar reactions. “Okay, so the house is haunted, but why not try to coexist with the ghosts? After all, it’s their home, too.” – “Okay, so someone is possessed by a demon, but where exactly is the problem? Why not share the body with the demon and come to an agreement?” That’s also why I immediately took to urban fantasy, when I became popular, because here finally were stories which asked the same questions I had asked myself for years at that point.

As a result, whenever I try to write horror, it usually comes out either as parody or a story where the protagonists try to figure out what the monsters want and how to deal with them without violence. All of the stories I am going to announce today fall into one of those categories. Coincidentally, all of them were July challenge stories, too.

The first new story is of the latter type, where the characters try to figure out what the spooky creatures want. It is a historical fantasy tale set in the Netherlands during the the Eighty-Years-War, during which the Netherlands attempted and eventually succeeded in getting rid of the Spanish occupation. A large part of the issue was that the Netherlands were largely Protestant and found themselves faced with the Spanish Inquisition (which they no more expected than anybody else).

Now my Dad worked in the Netherlands, when I was a teenager, and I usually spent my holidays there and got in contact with the local pop culture. And the Eighty-Years War still looms large in Dutch memory and popular culture just as the Thirty-Years-War a little later looms in the German memory. So I learned about the Eighty-Years War by cultural osmosis from comic books and a book on the history of Rotterdam that someone had given my Dad and that I read when I ran out of reading material.

The actual inspiration for the story was a piece of fantasy art, namely this one by Michael MacRae. It’s an evocative piece that somehow made me think of the Netherlands in the 16th century. The story grew from there.

The problem when writing historical fiction (or historical fantasy) set during less explored periods is how much information the reader needs to tell them when and where the story is set. The first draft contained references to the Lowlands, William of Orange, the Spanish oppressors and people executed for heresy, which seemed completely sufficient to me to let the reader know when and where the story is set. However, the Eighty-Years War is not all that well known to people outside the Netherlands, so I also explicitly mentioned the year and the place where the story is set.

So follow Ann and her little son Florentijn as they confront…

The Ghosts of Doodenbos

[image error]The Netherlands in the year of the Lord 1571: The young widow Ann lives alone with her little son Florentijn in a house at the edge of the woods.

From childhood on, Ann has been told to never ever go alone into the woods. But when her little son runs away, Ann has no choice. She must venture into the forest to save Florentijn from the creatures that live in the woods surrounding the village of Doodenbos.

This is a historical horror short story of 3000 words or approx. 12 pages.

 

More information.

Length: 3000 words

List price: 0.99 USD, EUR or GBP

Buy it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks, Google Play, Scribd, Smashwords, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Buecher.de, DriveThruFiction, Casa del Libro, Vivlio, 24symbols and XinXii.

While going through my backlog of unpublished stories, most of them July short story challenge stories, I realised that I had written no less than four stories featuring demon summoning rituals gone terribly wrong and thought, “Well, that’s enough for a collection then.” And this is how Demon Summoning for Beginners was born.

During the July short story challenge, I often use fantasy art as writing prompts and so two of the stories were inspired by pieces of fantasy art, namely this one by Nele Diehl and this one by David Velasquez.

Another story was inspired by watching an episode of Supernatural and getting annoyed at the badly mangled Latin used during a magical ritual. So I thought, “Well, if I’m annoyed, how annoyed will a demon be. And how will mangled Latin or mangled Hebrew affect a ritual?” The story grew from there.

The final story was inspired by noticing that the instruction for magical potions and spells and recipes for food often look remarkably similar, only that there are stranger ingredients in the former. So I thought, “What if a recipe accidentally conjures up a demon?”

These stories all fall into the parody category. Though the characters also try to figure out how to deal with a demon that none of them actually expected to show up.

So get ready for a lesson in…

Demon Summoning for Beginners

[image error]When observing a magical ritual in the woods, make sure to take precautions…

If you try to summon a demon to grant you your heart’s fondest desire, you’d better get your Latin right…

When studying ancient grimoires, it’s never a good idea to actually read the contents out loud or you might just cause the end of the world…

Following your grandma’s heirloom recipe might just conjure up something other than marinara sauce…

Four short humorous horror tales of rituals gone very wrong by Hugo finalist Cora Buhlert of 5800 words or approx. 20 print pages altogether.

More information.

Length: 5800 words

List price: 0.99 USD, EUR or GBP

Buy it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks, Google Play, Scribd, Smashwords, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Buecher.de, DriveThruFiction, Casa del Libro, Vivlio, 24symbols and XinXii.

The final new release for this month is a collection of two short vampire stories. Both of them fall under the banner of “How can you deal with a vampire without staking them?”

Both stories were July challenge stories, but one of the stories was actually written on the day of the 2020 Hugo ceremony and indeed I wrote part of the story during the neverending Hugo ceremony from hell.

The story in question, “The House at Green Corner”, is also inspired by a real house with an overgrown garden in my neighbourhood, which  looks exactly as it is described in the story.

In summer, I like taking walks in the early morning just before the sun comes up to avoid the heat of the day. And during one of those walks I noticed that there were a lot of bats fluttering around the house and its garden. Like the protagonist, I assumed that the bats probably lived in the overgrown garden. And then I thought, “Maybe the bats don’t just live in the garden, maybe they are the owners of the house and they’re all vampires.” The story grew from there.

So get ready to meet some vampires and make sure to avoid the…

Puncture Wounds

[image error]Every morning, Brett finds blood on his sheets and mysterious puncture wounds on his body. But as he tries to trap the “night pricker”, as he calls his unseen assailant, he’s in for a surprise…

The house at Green Corner has been standing there for fifty years now, surrounded by a tall fence and even taller hedges. And at dawn, bats flutter around the overgrown garden. No one has ever seen the owner of the house, let alone spoken to them. But early one morning, paper girl Maddie decides to venture beyond the tall hedges on a dare and finds something very unexpected…

Two modern vampire tales by Hugo finalist Cora Buhlert of 5000 words or approx. 18 print pages altogether.

More information.

Length: 5000 words

List price: 0.99 USD, EUR or GBP

Buy it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks, Google Play, Scribd, Smashwords, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Buecher.de, DriveThruFiction, Casa del Libro, Vivlio, 24symbols and XinXii.

If you want to read all of my attempts at horror fiction, the cheapest way to do so is via The Spooky Bundle, which is available exclusively at DriveThruFiction.

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Star Trek Discovery arrives “Far From Home”

It’s time for this week’s episode by episode Star Trek Discovery review. For my takes on previous seasons and episodes, go here.

Warning! Spoilers behind the cut!

Whereas last week’s episode followed Michael’s explosive arrival 900 years in the future, this week’s episode follows the Discovery‘s equally explosive arrival.

“Far From Home” starts where season 2 left off, with the Discovery emerging from the wormhole, while most of the crew knocked unconscious. This is a problem, because the Discovery is hurtling at full speed towards a planet. The bridge crew wakes up just in time to avert the worst, but the Discovery still crashes on the surface of an unknown planet that is definitely not Terralysium either (and once again portrayed by Iceland) in a thrilling scene. Is it me or has Discovery upped the ante with regard to effects heavy space scenes this season?

The combined efforts of the bridge crew manage to bring the Discovery down in one piece, but the ship is still badly damaged, rendering the sensors, much of the power supply as well as the internal and external comms useless, which means that the Discovery has no way of finding out where and when they have landed. Nor do they have any way of contacting Michael. Though the damaged scanners still function well enough for Tilly to find life, telling the Discovery crew that their mission to thwart the evil AI Control’s attempt to destroy all life in the universe was a success. Of course, the viewer already knows this from last episode, but the Discovery crew doesn’t.

However, several crewmembers have been injured, including the pilot Lieutenant Dettmer, who spends much of the episode wandering around in a daze, which might be PTSD or might be a sign that something is wrong with her cyber-implant (Shades of Control?). And while we’re on the subject of the bridge crew, which has been underserved by Discovery so far, it’s notable that those characters get more to do in this episode and are also fleshed out a little more. I can actually remember their names now rather than referring to them by monickers such as “cyborg woman” (Dettmer), “woman with awesome cornrows” (Owosegun), “cute black guy” (Bryce) or “cute Asian guy” (Rhys). And talking of underserved characters, Linus, the Reptilian crewmember with the sneezing problem, is back as well, as is the attractive black woman doctor. Though the only crewmember whose name is new in the credits is Rachael Ancheril as the security chief Commander Nhan. And come to think of it, the Discovery has gone through almost as many security chiefs as captains by now. First, there was that awful woman who was eaten by the tardigrade, then there was Ash Tyler, until he developed a split personality problem, and from season 2 on, there has been Commander Nhan. Since she’s in the credits now, I suspect she’s here to stay.

Meanwhile, Saru is still captain and is growing increasingly comfortable with his role. He tells the crew that before they can go out to explore the future and look for Michael, they must first repair the Discovery. And so the crew – those that are still able to walk, at any rate – go ahead to do just that. The repair efforts quickly run into a snag, when some gadget that is needed to restore the communication system is found to be broken and cannot be repaired without a mineral called rubidinum (not to be confused with rubidium, which is an alcalic metal and actual element of the periodic table). Luckily, there just happens to be a deposit of rubidinium on the planet. Even more luckily, there is a mining colony nearby.

Saru decides to head for that mining colony to trade for the Rubidinum and takes Tilly along, over the objections of Nhan and Georgiou. Because while Nhan and Georgiou might be a better choice to have on your side, in case there is a conflict, Saru isn’t looking for conflict. He wants to make a good first impression and, so he tells Tilly, Tilly is a wonderful first impression.

Can I take a moment to point out how awesome Saru has become? I know I was a bit hard on the character during season 1, largely because bad writing in the early episodes made Saru come across like a jerk. But by now Saru has been fleshed out and developed and is just a great character. Since his adventure in “An Obol for Charon” last season, his ever-present fear is gone, but Saru still retains his compassion and his understanding of others’ fear, e.g. Tilly’s, and will always seek a non-violent solution, if possible. However, Saru has also become a lot more confident, as evidenced by the fact that he stands up to Nhan and even Empress Philippa the Merciless herself – twice. Note, this is the same Philippa Georgiou who used to mainly view Saru as a tasty snack. And now she’s (reluctantly) taking orders from what to her is basically a piece of sushi. This is amazing character development. Saru is slowly but steadily creeping up in my personal ranking of favourite Star Trek captains. He is also – and this is something that gets overlooked a lot for some reason – pretty much the only non-human Starfleet captain we have ever seen. Cause for an organisation so committed to diversity, Starfleet is remarkably human led with the occasional high-ranking Vulcan admiral, who inevitably turns out to be a villain. See the Romulan pretending to be Vulcan admiral from Star Trek Picard or the Vulcan logic extremist admiral from season 2 of Discovery. What makes Saru even more amazing is how much character and emotion Doug Jones manages to bring to his role, even though he is covered in several kilos of prosthetic make-up, which shows once again what a huge injustice it was that Doug Jones was the only member of the main cast of The Shape of Water who did not get an Oscar nomination. In his review at Tor.com, Keith R.A. DeCandido agrees with me that Saru is awesome.

After a brisk walk through the beautiful Icelandic landscape (Discovery is really getting a lot of mileage out of that filming location), Saru and Tilly reach a very steampunky mining colony complete with a bucket-wheel excavator. But then bucket-wheel excavators look positively science fictional, especially if you’ve never seen one before. Saru and Tilly notice that they are being watched and follow the watcher, who leads them to a bar full of patrons who are not exactly happy to see them. Interestingly, given the revelations of last episode, the patrons in the bar are not only aware that the Discovery crashlanded on their planet (well, it’s kind of big and hard to miss), but also that the Discovery is a Starfleet ship.

Saru convinces the bar patrons that he and Tilly come in peace and persuades them to lower their weapons, but they’re still not particularly willing to help. That changes, when Tilly, who had detected warp-capable ships but no dilithium during her earlier scan, blurts out that they have dilithium. Considering how rare and valuable dilithium is in this brave new world of the 32nd century, the bar patrons are now willing to trade. A young man named Cal repairs the rubidinium doohickey and reveals his enthusiasm for Starfleet and his hope that one day, the Federation will come to help the beleaguered miners. He also takes a liking to Tilly, who almost gives herself away as a time traveller, when she is impressed by Cal’s nano repair technology.

The rest of the miners don’t share Cal’s faith in the Federation, though it also becomes clear that they are terrified not of Saru and Tilly, but of someone else. That someone else turns out to be a corrupt courier named Zaher, who brutally subjugates and exploits the miners. When an outraged Saru demands why the Federation doesn’t do anything about Zaher, he his met by derisive laughter and looks of “And where exactly have you been these past 150 years?”

No sooner is Zaher mentioned that he shows up in person, looking very much like a villain from a late 1960s Italian western. Just as “stranger(s) walk into a town beleagured by bandits/villains and help out” is a classic western plot that is the basis of The Magnificent Seven, Shane, For a Fistful of Dollars, Django and dozens of other classic westerns. Indeed, as Camestros Felapton also points out in his review, the mining colony scenes feel more like a Firefly type space western than Star Trek proper.

For even though Gene Roddenberry famously sold the original Star Trek to network executives as “Wagon Train to the Stars” and the word “Trek” in the franchise name hints at westerns, there aren’t a lot of western elements in Star Trek except for the occasional episode like “Spectre of the Gun”, where Kirk, Spock and the gang are forced to reenact the gunfight at the O.K. Coral as the losing side (coincidentally, this episode taught me, together with a long forgotten YA novel about the conflict between Sapin and England in the 16th century, that good guys and bad guys is often merely a matter of perspective, which is why I will always have a soft spot for it), and “The Paradise Syndrome”, where Kirks lands on a planet inhabited by indigenous stereotypes and falls in love with one of them. But otherwise, Star Trek dabbles a lot less in western tropes than many other SF TV series such as the original Battlestar Galactica, which had a lot of episodes shot on movie ranches and backlot western towns dressed up with Christmas lights (and of course, the original Commander Adama Lorne Greene was a western veteran best known for Bonanza, though he will always be the one and only true Adama to me), let alone Firefly or The Mandalorian. Of course, western and space opera mash-ups have a long history – Bat Durston notwithstanding – at least partly due to both genres developing around the same time and often being written by the same writers, but the space western is still a part of the larger science fiction genre that Star Trek has rarely explored, let alone successfully. In fact, it seems to me as if someone in the Discovery writers’ room is determined to explore all of those space opera tropes and subgenres that Star Trek has traditionally ignored. This is very good thing, because it allows Discovery to feel fresh even after 54 years of Star Trek.

Zaher wastes no time establishing himself as a villain. He shoots Cal, threatens Saru and harrasses Tilly. He also makes it very clear that he wants to Discovery for himself. Saru tries to negotiate and persuades Zaher to accept dilithium instead of taking the entire ship, but Zaher insists that Tilly goes out alone to get it. However, there is a catch, because night is about to fall. And the nameless planet, on which the Discovery crashlanded, is afflicted by an infestation of nocturnal parasitic ice, which devours and crushes everything in its path, including eventually the Discovery itself. On her own, Tilly has almost no chance against the substance.

Luckily for Saru and Tilly, Empress Philippa the Merciless has zero interest in following orders, let alone following orders from a tasty snack, and has followed Saru and Tilly. She confronts Zaher and points out correctly that the reason he is so eager to get the dilithium as well as Saru’s and Tilly’s equipment is that there is a bigger fish than Zaher who’s after the same thing. Meanwhile, Zaher has realised that Saru, Tilly and Georgiou are time travellers. Zaher shoots Georgiou with the same weapon he used to kill poor Cal, but Empress Philippa the Merciless is made of stronger stuff than that. She uses her mean martial arts skills to take out Zaher’s gang. Saru helps by shooting off some of the handy spikes that have grown where his danger-sensing ganglia used to be, while Tilly wisely hides behind the bar. Georgiou is about to kill Zaher, but Saru stops her, because they’re still Starfleet and killing random villains is not was Starfleet does. Grumblingly, Georgiou obeys. Evil mirror universe Empress or not, Michelle Yeoh continues to be a delight as Philippa Georgiou. It’s clear how much fun Michelle Yeoh is having. Also, Georgiou continues to hit on every sentient being in sight, including Nhan and Linus, the reptilian crewman. Part of me now wants to introduce Empress Philippa the Merciless to Captain Jack Harkness of Doctor Who and Torchwood fame, though I suspect the result would be too much even HBO.

Saru tells the miner leader that Zaher is their problem and that it’s their place to decide what shall happen to him. The miner leader decides to chase Zaher out into the night and the parasitic ice, with exactly the same equipment he was going to give Tilly. Then the miner leader gives Saru a portable transporter to take him back to the Discovery, before she is devoured by the ice.

Meanwhile, aboard Discovery, the repairs are proceeding apace. Paul Stamets, who was injured in the season 2 finale (which I for one had completely forgotten) and in a medically induced coma, is woken up earlier than usual by his partner/husband Doctor Culber, because with all the crash casualties, the medical staff needs the bed. There is a kiss and a declaration of love and Culber also quickly fills in Stamets on what happened while he was out. Stamets, being Stamets, immediately wants to help with the repairs, but Culber tells him that he needs at least one cycle in a regeneration unit. But of course, Stamets – being Stamets – checks himself out of the sick bay and shows up in the engine room to help out Jet Reno, who was also injured during the crash, but is in better shape than Stamets.

Anthony Rapp as Paul Stamets and Tig Notaro as Jet Reno were a brilliant double act in season 2 and their banter continues to delight in this episode. There is a moment, where someone has to climb into a Jeffries tube to carry out a vital repair, but both Reno and Stamets are too injured to do the job. Stamets, being the stubborn sort, finally volunteers and climbs into the tube, when he almost passes out and his wound starts bleeding again. Reno and Culber, who is horrified to find Stamets gone, talk him through the repair job.

The sounds of the Discovery‘s hull straining under the pressure of the parasitic ice make a great ticking clock. But with Stamets repairing the doohickey in the Jeffries tube and Bryce replacing the rubidinium doohickey, the repairs are successful. The Discovery now has power and a functional communications system again and just in time, too, for the ice is about to devour the ship. Saru orders the still out of sorts Dettmer to take off, but the ice is too strong and the Discovery can’t get off the ground. A mystery vessel appears just in the nick of time and pulls out the Discovery with a tractor beam.

Saru suspects that this mystery vessel might be whoever Zaher was afraid of. But when the mystery vessel hails them and the bridge crew asks Saru what to do, fire or talk, Saru decides to talk. He answers the call and who appears on the bridge viewscreen other than Michael Burnham, rocking a great cornrow hairstyle that can give Owosegun’s a run for her money. Everybody is thrilled to see Michael, though Saru notes that her hair looks different (another great bit of acting here from Doug Jones, who perfectly conveys Saru’s mystification as a member of a hairless species what human hair is good for). Now Michael drops the bombshell. The Discovery arrived in the 32nd century a year after Michael did.

“Far From Home” is an all around great episode that gives the Discovery crew a chance to shine in a show that is all too often focussed mainly on Michael Burnham. The dialogue is a delight, whether it’s Tilly telling Georgiou that she has some Leland stuck to her shoe or an exasperated Doctor Culber telling Stamets that he wants him to live, so he can kill him himself, or an equally exasperated Reno replying to Stamets question why she just called him “bobcat”, “I don’t know. I’m on drugs.” The greatest strength of any Star Trek series have always been the characters and their interplay and Discovery has both in spades. I also want to give a shoutout to Gene, the young crewman who is tasked with what must be the worst job aboard the Discovery, cleaning up the remains of Leland from the spore drive chamber.

“Far From Home” is not a particularly complicated episode. It’s a simple story – the ship had crashed, vital components are needed and the crew walks into a standard western plot – that we have seen dozens of times before in other SF series. But Star Trek Discovery nonetheless manages to turn this simple and straightforward story into something memorable.

Two episodes in, it seems as if the overarching theme of this season is hope and the way that Starfleet and the Federation symbolise that hope to many inhabitants of a dystopian future, as James Whitbrook at io9 and Zack Handlen at the AV Club also point out in their reviews. Now I have always been sceptical of the Federation and saw it as a very flawed utopia at best. Nonetheless, after all the “dark Federation” and “evil Starfleet” subplots of earlier seasons of Discovery as well as Star Trek Picard, a universe which sees the Federation as the symbol of hope is a breath of fresh air.

Now the gang is back together, we will apparently visit Earth next episode. And I for one can’t wait.

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Retro Review: “Transparent Stuff” by Dorothy Quick

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This cover illustration is not for “Transparent Stuff”, but for “But Without Horns” by Norvell Page.

I’m continuing my reviews of Dorothy Quick’s Patchwork Quilt stories with “Transparent Stuff”, the second story in the series, which appeared in the June 1940 issue of Unknown. The story may be read online here. You can also read Steve J. Wright’s review of the story along with the rest of the issue here. This review will also be crossposted to Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!

This time around, Dorothy Quick plunges us right into the story by having her protagonist Alice select another square of fabric of the enchanted patchwork quilt to take her into the past. For those who missed the first story, Alice accidentally came across a magical patchwork quilt owned by her aunt Annabel. Many years ago, a witch assembled the quilt from scraps of fabric with powerful and often terrifying memories attached to them. If someone falls asleep under the quilt while touching one of the squares, they will relive whatever memory is attached to the respective square in their dreams.

“Transparent Stuff” is clearly set some time after the previous story “Blue and Silver Brocade”, for while Alice was terrified by her experience in the first story (to be fair, she did relive a black mass complete with bloody sacrifice and then found herself strangled to death), by now she has become almost addicted to the experiences the patchwork quilt can give her. Considering that the quilt has killed at least one person and driven another mad, this is very risky indeed.

The square Alice has chosen for her latest adventure is made of very sheer, nigh transparent linen, interwoven with golden and silver threads that form a floral pattern. And so, Alice falls asleep with her hand touching the square and suddenly finds herself clad in a gown made of the same transparent fabric and wearing elaborate jewellery. She manages to look at herself in a reflective surface and finds her own face looking back at her, though with very different make-up and hairstyle. So is Alice reliving the experiences of an ancestor this time or is reincarnation in play here?

Alice – and the reader – quickly learns that the body she is inhabiting belongs to a Babylonian princess named Star of Light. Star is the only child of King Mi-Bel of Babylon and she is about to be married off to a man of her father’s choosing. There is a rundown of suitors, none of whom sound remotely promising. One is too old and Star’s cousin besides, another is a drunk and a womaniser and the third is rumoured to consort with demons and engage in black magic. Star is understandably none too thrilled about these marital prospects and so she decides to ask the goddess Ishtar for help, aided by a priest named Abeshu.

Abeshu takes Star to a secret sanctuary inside the great temple and summons the goddess. After some ritualising and incense burning, the goddess Ishtar appears and tells Star that she need not marry any of the suitors vying for her hand and that she may marry the one her heart desires. She also promises Star the gift of eternal love, but warns her that there will be a price.

Finally, Ishtar also grants Abeshu his wish, even though he never utters it out loud. When Star asks Abeshu what he wished for, he gives her an evasive answer, but also asks that Star make him her counsellor. Star agrees, but Alice is sceptical about Abeshu’s motives, for she feels that the priest hates the young princess.

Next, Star and her lady-in-waiting Rima take a tour of the hanging gardens, one of the wonders of the ancient world, in Star’s royal litter. Star’s reverence for the beauty of the gardens is interrupted, when a young boy cries for help. Star signals the litter to stop and asks the captain of her guard to bring the boy to her.

The boy tells star that a man saved his mother’s life, when she was nearly trampled by a horse. However, the horse was injured in the process and now a mob is about to lynch the helpful stranger for harming one of the horses of Khian, Prince of Egypt and one of Star’s unwanted suitors. Star orders her guards to save the stranger. When Star lays eyes on the handsome stranger and his exposed muscular chest, it is love at first sight. Star is thrilled, for Ishtar has kept her word.

The stranger turns out to be an Egyptian mercenary named Belzar who was in service to Prince Khian, but quit, because he disliked the Prince. Star promptly engages his services and as she chats with her new guardsman, Belzar confesses that he loves her. Star responds that she loves him, too, and that it’s all Ishtar’s will. Of course, this is also a very convenient excuse for what romance readers call insta-love. However, a novelette doesn’t offer much space to slowly develop a romantic relationship, so divinely ordained insta-love is a handy shortcut.

Meanwhile, Alice remembers that Ishtar promised Star eternal love and since Alice is Star’s reincarnation and/or descendant, she wonders when she will find a Belzar of her own.

But Belzar also has bad news for Star, because Prince Khian is planning to abduct the princess and thus bypass the other suitors. Belzar, Star and the guard captain inform the King, who plans to set a trap for the kidnappers and hides his own guards and Belzar behind the draperies in Star’s chambers. Nonetheless, one of the kidnappers manages to throw a bag over Star and carry her off. But Belzar stops him with a dagger to the eye and rescues Star who is now even more in love with him than before. They kiss, but are quickly interrupted by the other guards.

However, King Mi-Bel still has other plans for his only daughter. Now that the plot of the treacherous Prince Khian has been exposed, Mi-Bel plans to wed Star to her much older cousin Ditmah. The betrothal will be announced at a great feast to be held that very evening, as Star learns from the duplicitous Abeshu. However, Abeshu has a plan to bring Star and Belzar together after all.

At the feast, Abeshu fills the King up with wine to make him more mellow. Belzar, who has been granted noble status as a thank you for saving Star from the kidnappers, is there as well. Just as the King is about to announce who will marry his daughter, Star stands up and begs the king to grant her to choose her own husband. She also asks that she and her chosen husband be allowed to live in a small palace near the temple of Ishtar. King Mi-Bel, who is well and truly drunk by now, grants her both wishes. So Star names Belzar as her chosen husband.

Mi-Bel is not at all pleased by Star’s choice, for what about all the carefully plotted political alliances that Star has just upset? So he asks Abeshu how to undo this match. This is the moment that the duplicitous Abeshu has been waiting for. He whispers his poisonous advice to the King.

The King now announces that Star shall wed Belzar and that she shall have a wedding feast befitting a princess. She and Belzar will also be allowed to dwell in the palace near the temple of Ishtar, just as Star desired. However, they will be immured inside a chamber in this palace, to be buried alive for all eternity, while cousin Ditmah becomes king of Babylon.

Belzar is surprisingly resigned to his fate – after all, the goddess Ishtar said that there would be a price, but she also promised them eternal love for all time. Star, meanwhile, confronts Abeshu about his treachery. Abeshu tells Star that she is the traitor, for she placed her own desires over her duty to Babylon, because women wanted to choose their own partners with no regard for political alliances – well, next they’ll be demanding the vote, too. And besides, Ditmah no more wanted to marry Star than Star wanted to marry him. Instead, he is in love with Abeshu’s niece and now she will mount the throne instead of Star. But Abeshu apparently has second thoughts about the awful fate to which he condemned the lovers, so he gives Belzar two lockets filled with a poison that will grant him and Star a painless death.

After a weeklong wedding feast, Abeshu escorts Star and Belzar to a small niche inside the palace where they will be immured. They both take the poison and once more proclaim their undying love for each other. Before the last stone is in place and the effect of the poison kicks in, the voice of Ishtar appears, telling Star and Belzar that she will remain true to her promise and that their love shall last forever.

Alice awakens, not at all troubled that she just died for love… again. Because the goddess Ishtar promised Star and Belzar that their love shall last forever. And if Alice is the reincarnation of Star, that means that the reincarnation of Belzar is waiting for her somewhere out there. Will she find him? Maybe we’ll find out in the third Patchwork Quilt story.

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Sadly, this compilation of novelettes eligible for the 1941 Retro Hugos is the only time “Transparent Stuff” has ever been reprinted.

While the first Patchwork Quilt story “Blue and Silver Brocade” mixed historical fiction with gothic horror and some surprisingly lurid violence, “Transparent Stuff” is more subdued – no black masses and graphic strangulation scenes – but the central love story is no less tragic and once again the lovers can only be united in death and beyond. The Patchwork Quilt stories are undoubtedly romance, but not romance in the modern sense, where a happy ending is required.

The downer ending of the forbidden lovers entombed together reminded me very much of Aida by Guiseppe Verdi, which is set in ancient Egypt rather than ancient Babylon, but ends in the same way, with the titular character, an Ethiopian princess turned Egyptian slave, and her lover, Egyptian general Radames, sentenced to be entombed together, because Radames betrayed his country for Aida. Considering how popular and frequently performed Aida is, it is very likely that Dorothy Quick was familiar with the opera. She also did have a thing for immurement – after all, her 1944 short story “The Gothic Window” features an immured sorcerer haunting a window (or does he?).

I’ve been an opera fan since I was a teenager, an age when most people listen only to pop music. Not that I didn’t listen to and enjoy pop music – I did and still do. However, I also loved operas and operettas, because they combined two things I loved, stories and music. And yes, I adored the melodramatic plots of operas, the more melodramatic the better. Concert performances of operas baffle me, because they omit all the fun stuff. And if I want to listen only to the music, I can do so at home.

Aida was always one of my favourite operas. When I was a teen, my Great-Aunt Metel, upon learning that I liked opera, gave me all the opera stuff that my Great-Uncle Rudy, another opera fan who sadly died before I was born (a pity, because I’m sure we would have gotten along just splendidly, since we both loved Italian opera), had left behind. That opera stuff included not just full orchestral scores of various operas, but also the libretti. And one of those libretti was Aida, which I loved so much that I even organised a spoken word puppet show (because though I had the orchestral score thanks to Uncle Rudy, I couldn’t recreate it on a single piano) for friends and family. And yes, that downer ending was tragic, though most operas ended with everybody dying for love, which my teen self thought was so romantic. So my reaction to the Patchwork Quilt stories is basically, “Wow, these stories very much channel everything my teenaged self loved”, which is unusual in itself, because I certainly wasn’t your average teenager. First we had Angelique, whose adventures I devoured, and now Aida.

All three Dorothy Quick stories I reviewed for the Retro Review project had female protagonists and POV-characters, which is rare in golden age speculative fiction. All three stories also pass the Bechdel test – though “Transparent Stuff” only passes it due to a quick conversation between Star and her lady-in-waiting Rima about the hanging gardens – which is even rarer.

Another thing I find notable about Dorothy’s Quick’s stories is that their protagonists are all women who know what they want in life, romantically and otherwise, and are not afraid to go after it, even if this doesn’t always end happily for them. Star wants to marry for love and not politics and gets her wish, even if it ends with her death. Francoise from “Blue and Silver Brocade” is willing to do literally anything to keep the attention of King Louis XIV of France and the influence it brings and her friend/companion Jeanne is willing to do anything to protect her. Anne from “The Gothic Window” arranges a weekend getaway in a house that may or may not be haunted in order to persuade her own boyfriend to propose, to fix up two friends with each other and protect another friend from her abusive and cheating husband. Unlike Star, Francoise and Jeanne, she even succeeds and does not die either. And finally, Alice, the protagonist of the framing stories linking the Patchwork Quilt tales, decides to explore the experiences the quilt can give her, even against all warnings.

The first Patchwork Quilt story, “Blue and Silver Brocade”, has only one named male character, Raoul, doomed lover/killer of the equally doomed Jeanne whose life and death Alice gets to relive. “Transparent Stuff” has more named male characters, but nonetheless it’s still a very woman-centric story. Star’s three unwanted suitors remain cyphers. Cousin Ditmah is the only one who actually appears on the page in a brief cameo. Prince Khian stages a kidnap attempt, but otherwise remains off stage. As for the third suitor, I can’t even remember his name – all I remember is that he is rumoured to be involved in black magic. Star’s father King Mi-Bel gets more screen time, but he also remains vague and indeed, Star notes at one point that her relationship to her father isn’t close, since she barely sees him. And of course, Mi-Bel is a hot candidate for the 1940 Retro Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Exceptionally Horrible Fictional Parents.

Of all the male characters in “Transparent Stuff”, the one who is the most fleshed out is the villainous priest Abeshu. He is also more complex than the average pulp villain, since his motivation is understandable. In many ways, Abeshu is a more sympathetic character than Mi-Bel who is just plain awful.

What’s interesting is that Belzar, Star’s one true love for all time, is not particularly fleshed out either. His role in the story is basically generic love interest/hero. Come to think of it, the love interests in the other Dorothy Quick stories I’ve read were mostly generic hero types as well. In fact, it’s fascinating how woman-centric Dorothy Quick’s stories are, for Quick completely reverses the common pattern of pulp era SFF. Instead of having several at least reasonably fleshed out male characters, while the women are generic love interests or equally generic femme fatales/villainesses, Dorothy Quick features more complex female characters and generic men.

Dorothy Quick is the sort of writer who likes to delve into details and describes clothing, buildings, interiors, etc… And her description of ancient Babylon impressed me with how fairly closely it matches what we know of ancient Babylon today, especially considering how bad Unknown was about historical accuracy otherwise. True, Quick is vague in her description of the hanging gardens, but then we still have no idea what they actually looked like in bloom. So I dug a bit into the exploration history of Babylon and found that the archaeological exploration of Babylon began in the early nineteenth century. Of particular note is the German team of archaeologist Robert Koldewey and orientalist Eduard Sachau, who started their excavations in Babylon in 1897 and found among other things what remains of the hanging gardens as well as the spectacular Ishtar Gate with its blue glazed tiles. The reconstructed Ishtar Gate may be seen in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin (and I recommend that everybody who visits Berlin go and see it, because it’s very impressive). The reconstruction was finished in 1930, i.e. ten years before “Transparent Stuff” was published. Again, it is likely that Dorothy Quick was familiar with Koldewey and Sachau’s work and the Ishtar Gate and incorporated this knowledge into her story.

Though this is only the second of three Patchwork Quilt stories, the central gimmick of an enchanted quilt which can make those who sleep under it relive the past is already well established by now, so well that Dorothy Quick introduces a new element in the form of reincarnation and fated soulmates. It’s a great way to maintain interest in the series. After all, the readers wants to know when/if Alice will find her own fated soulmate, the reincarnation of Belzar. This reader at any rate wants to know. Considering that Unknown seems to have been aimed mainly at the same nerdy young men as its sister magazine Astounding, as Steve J. Wright notes here, I’m not so sure about other readers. And it is notable that the Patchwork Quilt series had only three instalments, the last of which appeared in December 1940, even though Unknown would continue until 1943. So did Campbell drive away Dorothy Quick like he drove away so many other talented writers over the years?

I don’t know, but I’m definitely looking forward to reading the last Patchwork Quilt story. Next to Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, this is definitely the best series to come out of Unknown. A pity that it has never been reprinted.

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Star Trek Discovery Goes Back to the Future in “That Hope Is You, Part 1”

Star Trek Discovery is back for its third season, which means that I’ll be doing episode by episode reviews again. For my takes on the first two seasons, go here.

In spring, I rewatched seasons 1 and 2 of Discovery with my Mom who hadn’t seen them yet for lack of Netflix. And while I initially was very harsh on season 1 of Discovery, I found that I have mellowed somewhat in the meantime, largely because I knew where the series was going and could also appreciate the little hints dropped in regarding Lorca’s true identity. Though the first four episodes of season 1 are still tough going and particularly episode 3 “Context Is For Kings” is really dreadful. And indeed, I had to assure my Mom, “Yes, the first few episodes are bad, but it gets better.”

Now Star Trek Discovery‘s main problem has always been inconsistency, both behind and in front of the camera (two seasons in, Discovery has already gone through three and a half captains and five showrunners). Particularly season 1 felt like about five different shows stitched together, only some of which actually were Star Trek. Season 2 was more consistent and also a lot better, though they were hampered by having to repair the mistakes of season 1, while sticking to established Star Trek continuity. And then season 2 Star Trek Discovery promptly upset the apple cart again by sending the Discovery on a one way trip 900 years into the future in the season finale, opening up the way for entirely new adventures unencumbered by established Star Trek continuity.

So let’s see how season 3 is doing.

Warning! Spoilers behind the cut!

Pretty well, it turns out. At any rate, I thoroughly enjoyed part 1 of “That Hope Is You”. For inconsistent as Discovery may be otherwise, it is remarkably consistent in one aspect, namely that it becomes a completely different show every couple of episodes.

This iteration of Star Trek Discovery starts off as a space action adventure that is more reminiscent of Firefly or even Star Wars than of any version of Star Trek. Indeed, Keith R.A. DeCandido notes the same in his review of this episode at Tor.com, as does Sam Thielman at the Guardian.

After a brief interlude with a character whose name and purpose we will learn later, we meet the first new member of the main cast, Cleveland “Book” Booker as played by David Ajala. Book is a courier who transports more or less legal cargo on behalf of others. He starts out as your typical space rogue, which is still one of my favourite science fiction archetypes. Unlike most other science fiction franchises, Star Trek has never really embraced the space rogue archetype until recently. Space rogues do appear in Star Trek from the original series on, but most of the time they’re just guest characters. Christobal Rios from Star Trek Picard was the first space rogue main character in a Star Trek series and Book is set to be the second.

I’m also happy to see a space rogue played by a black man (and Rios is played by a man of colour as well, Chilean British actor Santiago Cabrera), if only because the two original space rogues and thus the granddaddies of all the other space rogues in science fiction, were both men of colour. C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith, who was the original space rogue, is described as brown-skinned and Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Stark, his first descendant and still one of the best, is unambiguously described as a black man (Inbetween those two, there’s also Leigh Brackett’s Roy Campbell, another space outlaw with dark skin and a heart of gold). Of course, cover and interior artists have been ignoring this fact for decades, which is why I’m so thrilled to finally see a space rogue portrayed as a black man. The fact that David Ajala is hot doesn’t hurt either. Nor does the fact that he has a striking and very big cat named Grudge.

When we first meet Book aboard his spaceship, he’s in trouble, because he’s being chased by someone from whom he apparently stole something. But there’s worse trouble coming for Book, when a wormhole opens and out pops none other than Michael Burnham in the Red Angel suit. To refresh everybody’s memories, in the season 2 finale Michael Burnham used the time travelling Red Angel suit developed by her mother to take herself and the Discovery 900 years into the future to get the valuable data from the infodump sphere that is stored in Discovery‘s computer away from Control, a malevolent AI (Is there any other kind in Star Trek?) hellbent on destroying all life in the universe.

Upon emerging from the wormhole, Michael promptly crashes into Book’s ship which causes both of them to crashland on a planet that’s very definitely not Terralysium where Michael was originally headed. Michael manages to reboot the damaged Red Angel suit just in time to save her from splattering all over the surface of the planet whose name I didn’t get (portrayed by Iceland, which is certainly a change from “Every world in the galaxy looks like British Columbia, unless it looks like California or a quarry in Wales”). The suit is damaged and when Michael tries to contact Discovery, they’re not answering. Plus, the wormhole is closing, so Michael grabs an emergency survival kit, programs the Red Angel suit to fly back through the wormhole, send the final signal (which she promised Spock she’d do) and then self-destruct. Next Michael scans for lifeforms, any lifeform, to make sure that Control was truly beaten and did not manage to destroy all life in the universe after all. She’s successful, which we already know. Coincidentally, the lifeform scan also explains a brief, but likely expensive CGI sequence of an alien scorpion-like critter eating an equally alien dragonfly. Though I’m not entirely sure why we need to see alien scorpions and dragonflies, when we’ve already seen Book, his cat and his pursuer, all of whom are very obviously lifeforms.

Since Michael is all alone on a strange planet with nothing but a Starfleet emergency kit, she decides to seek out the nearest lifeform that’s not a scorpion or dragonfly. And of course, this lifeform happens to be Book whose ship crashed on the beach of an alien sea.

Book is not at all pleased to see Michael and not just because she caused his ship to crash. Because in typical space rogue style, Book is pretending very hard to be someone who only looks out for number one. As with all space rogues, it’s a front, as we and Michael eventually find out. And indeed the fact that Book loves his cat is a classic clue. Because while a space rogue may pretend to be a tough guy who doesn’t care about anyone other than themselves, all of them have a secret heart of gold. They only need the right person – usually an attractive woman, sometimes a male friend or cuddly pet and sometimes Baby Yoda – to bring out the good that’s hidden deep inside them.

Though Book also has a good reason to be wary of Michael. After all, she did crash into his ship and caused it to crash. Never mind that Book is still on the run from those who want the cargo he stole. And so Book and Michael’s first meeting quickly turns into a duel allowing them both to show off their martial arts skills and also allowing Book to show off his futuristic weaponry. The fight ends in a draw and both agree to put their weapons away on the count of three.

Michael, who never wanted a fight in the first place, now tries to introduce herself to Book and ask him for help, which isn’t successful, because Book is still pretending very hard not to care about anyone other than himself. In fact, he doesn’t even want to know Michael’s name, because if he learns her name, he might find himself forced to care about her and her plight after all.

The non-conversation between Michael and Book also gives us some information about the brave new future world in which Michael finds herself. For starters, the Federation is no more. It fell apart some 100 or 120 years ago, before Book’s birth at any rate. One still sees Federations relics on occasion – and Book does recognise Michael badge – but those are just relics for the terminally nostalgic. As for why the Federation fell apart, well, there was an event called “the Burn” (the name similarity to the main character is hopefully just a coincidence), during which most dilithium crystals in the galaxy suddenly became unstable and blew up, killing a lot of people and making warp travel difficult, if not impossible (and how lucky that the Discovery has the magic mushroom drive). That caused trade routes and communication lines to break down and the Federation to fall apart. As civilisation ending events go, a natural disaster that causes a breakdown of communication and supply lines is certainly one that’s not overused. I also can’t help but notice the parallels to John Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy, where the breakdown of the “Flow” that makes space travel possible almost leads to a collapse of civilisation.

Because “the Burn” destroyed most dilithium supplies in the galaxy, dilithium is exceedingly difficult to come by. And because Book’s ship crashed, he is desperate need of dilithium. Meanwhile, Michael is in desperate need of a subspace communicator to contact Discovery. And so Michael and Book decide to cooperate for now. Michael offers Book one of her valuable “antiques”, her tricorder, if he takes her to a trading post where she can find a subspace communicator and contact Discovery.

So the two of them set out towards what appears to be the only city on the planet. Of course, it doesn’t make sense that there is only one major city on a planet that otherwise seems to be uninhabited, but it gives the production team the chance to show off some gorgeous Icelandic landscapes. And if you have the chance to shoot your alien planet scenes in Iceland, you might as well make the most of it.

The city/trading post, when we finally see it, looks just like what you’d expect a sleazy city/trading post in somewhat dystopian science fiction world to look like. There are skyscrapers, there are a lot of neon lights, there are dodgy aliens. Though Michael is in for a surprise, because the dodgy aliens running this particular trading post are none other than the green-skinned Orions, from whom every Star Trek viewer would expect that sort of behaviour, working with the blue-skinned and antennaed Andorians, from whom we don’t expect that sort of thing. But its the 32nd century and things are different there.

At the trading post, Michael quickly runs into the kind of trouble you would expect to find at such a place. Book double-crosses her and steals her Starfleet emergency kit to trade it for dilithium. Michael is arrested and subjected to an interrogation drug that makes her babble like a waterfall in a hilarious scene. Pretty much the first thing she tells her captors is that they should never use that particular drug on Tilly, something we can all agree with. Eventually Michael gets around to telling her captors all about Book, his stolen cargo and how he double-crossed her and so Book, who has trouble selling the antiques he stole from Michael, gets arrested as well. He also gets a well-deserved punch in the face from Michael. It’s not the only punch she’ll give him.

Surrounded by hostile Andorians, Orions and Tellurians, Book and Michael decide to work together once more, which leads to a free for all fight scene. Michael grabs some dilithium crystals, Book activates his portable transporter (one of the technological leaps we and Michael encounter) and beams them both out of there. What follows is a merry chase across the gorgeous Icelandic landscape, because their pursuers also have portable transporters as well as a way of tracking them. The chase culminates in Book pushing Michael off a cliff, which promptly earns him another well-deserved punch in the face.

Eventually, the chase leads back to Book’s ship, where they are captured and surrounded. The Andorian-Orion-Tellurian villains persuade Book to give them the code to his cargo hold, which is when Michael – and we – finally see just what this mysterious cargo Book has stolen is. For it turns out that the cargo is alive and that it’s an endangered creature called a transworm. The worm conveniently eats the bad guys and swallows Michael, but Book persuades the worm to spit her out again.

The scene with the worm and a slightly earlier scene where Book persuades a plant with healing properties to grow via meditation also shows us and Michael that there is more than meets the eye to our handsome space rogue. Because Book has an empathic link to plant and animal life and also glowing spots that appear on his skin when he meditates. He mentions “his people” at one point, which makes me wonder whether he is human or a typical Star Trek style humanoid alien.

Book, it turns out, is using his courier job to rescue endangered species, there being no Federation around to protect them, and bring them to a safe place. And he takes the transworm to such a safe place and just in time for mating season, too. Michael tags along. After all, she has nowhere else to go and besides, Book has just revealed himself to be definitely one of the good guys. That he’s smoking hot certainly doesn’t hurt either.

Protecting those weaker than themselves is a character trait of space rogues that goes back to the early examples of the archetype from the 1940s. Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Stark may have considered himself a mercenary outlaw, but he rarely fought for the winning side, but usually on the side of oppressed indigenous people against evil corporations intent on wiping out their habitat and way of life. There is a reason I called him Social Justice Warrior of Mars. Other Leigh Brackett characters like Roy Campbell from “Citadel of Lost Ships” or Rick Urquart from the 1945 Retro Hugo winner Shadow Over Mars are similar in that they fight for oppressed indigenous people against capitalist exploiters such as those champions of truth in advertising, the delightfully named Terran Exploitation Company. Even the environmentalist angle already shows up in those early stories, because the evil exploitationary corporations usually destroy the environment along with the indigenous people they oppress. You can also find similar traits in other space rogue characters. Han Solo may pretend that he only cares about himself, but he also rescues Chewbacca, another member of an oppressed indigenous people, from abusive slavers and wins a friend for life. Meanwhile, Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly embodies the darker side of the libertarian strain that is always evident in space rogue characters. So Book is in good company with his heart for endangered species. Though it’s interesting that while his predecessors usually saved intelligent alien species that were a more or less thinly veiled stand-in for real world indigenous people, Book focusses on saving endangered non-intelligent alien species. But then, aliens as stand-ins for marginalised groups in the real world really doesn’t work anymore in the 21st century.

Book has also figured out by now that Michael is a time traveller – not that this is exactly hard to guess, even though according to Book all time travel technology was outlawed following a temporal war two centuries before. I suspect that this is the same temporal war mentioned in Star Trek Enterprise some twenty years ago. Book also reveals that he had a subspace communicator all the time, which he now lets Michael use to call the Discovery. Alas, Discovery still doesn’t reply.

Michael is now determined to seek out what is left of Starfleet to ask them for assistance. And luckily, Book knows just who might be able to help, namely a former Starfleet relay station that is crewed only by a single person, but otherwise abandoned. So Michael and Book head to the station and meet the character we had briefly seen early in the episode getting up day after day (after being woken by an alarm clock disguised as a holographic bird). His name is Aditya Sahil (played by Adil Hussain) and he has been manning this Starfleet outpost alone for forty years, waiting for other Starfleet officials to show up. Though, as he confesses to Michael, he’s not really a Starfleet officer, because he was never sworn in, since there was no one left to do it. But his father and grandfather were Starfleet officers and so he remains at his post, even when there is no one out there answering.

Michael uses Sahil’s scanners and communications relay to search for Discovery, but again doesn’t turn up anything. Though the scan range is only a few sectors, because the long-range scanners are broken, as Sahil confesses, and there’s no one left to repair them (sounds like a job for Paul Stamets and Jet Reno, once they finally show up).

Michael deduces that the Discovery has either turned up out of the range of the station’s scanners or that she is still in transit and might show up either tomorrow or a thousand years in the future. Nonetheless, Michael is not willing to give up hope, especially not since Sahil has just told her that she is the hope he’s been waiting for his whole life. And so Michael makes Sahil leading communication officer and decides to rebuild the Federation and Starfleet with her little army consisting of Book, Sahil and Grudge the cat. They also raise the Federation flag aboard the outpost, because only a commissioned officer can do so.

If “Let’s rebuild this great multi-planet political entity that fell decades before” sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The basic idea goes all the way back to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, but the Discovery producers probably found it much closer to home. For as Keith R.A. DeCandido explains here, Gene Roddenberry himself came up with the idea for a 1973 TV movie and never produced follow-up show called Genesis II. The planned TV series finally came about with some alterations in 2000 and was called Andromeda. It was not very good, as far as I recall. So Star Trek Discovery is the third attempt to make Gene Roddenberry’s more than forty years old idea work, only this time around in the Star Trek universe.

And indeed the basic Genesis II/Andromeda idea is not a bad premise for a science fiction show, which is probably why it keep getting reused. But touching as Michael’s determination and Sahil’s faith in an institution that no longer exists are, there are several huge problems with restoring Starfleet and the Federation.

The first is that inconvenient Prime Directive, which forbids Starfleet from meddling with other civilisations. And Michael is about to meddle in a big way without even knowing whether the galaxy needs or wants a new Federation, as Gavia Baker-Whitelaw points out in her review at the Daily Dot. Not to mention that Michael trying to rebuild the Federation 900 years later is as if a medieval cog fell through a time warp and its crew decided to rebuild the Hanseatic League in the modern European Union. It’s neither feasible nor welcome. Of course, with Starfleet and the Federation gone, the Prime Directive no longer applies (and it only ever applied, when this was convenient for the plot anyway). Still, you’d think that Michael would at least try to adhere to the highest ideal of the institution she serves.

The second point is that while the Federation may consider itself a utopia and Starfleet may consider itself its servants and protectors, neither Starfleet nor the Federation itself have ever lived up to their ideals. The Federation has always been a very flawed utopia from the original series on, as Camestros Felapton points out in his review. And while I suspect that the flaws were unintentional in the original series and The Next Generation, the latter day series, particularly Deep Space Nine, Picard and – yes – Discovery, focussed a lot on the many flaws of the Federation and Starfleet.

And while Sahil may be forgiven for believing Starfleet’s own propaganda, considering he never experienced the real thing, Michael knows only too well what the Starfleet and the Federation really are like. After all, they gave her a life sentence and planned to use her as cheap slave labour for a supposed crime that was largely beyond her control. And then they left her at the mercy of a villainous spaceship captain from the Mirror Universe. Yes, I know that the show is pretending very hard that season 1 never happened, but Michael lived through these events. She should at least be a little bit sceptical about Starfleet and the Federation. Of course, it’s quite possible that she intends to rebuild Starfleet and the Federation like they should be, not as they were. Still, given Michael’s experiences, her optimism and utter faith in the Federation is a little odd.

Sonequa Martin-Green continues to do a great job as Michael and also gets to show off her acting range in this episode, as she goes from terrified to elated to desperate to drugged to her gills and back again. It’s also interesting that Michael seems to have ditched the emotional repression her Vulcan upbringing instilled in her. David Ajala is a welcome addition as Book and brings a lot of natural charm and depth to what could have been a very one-note character. Besides, he has a lot of chemistry with Sonequa Martin-Green. And as James Whitbrook points out in his review at io9, Michael and Book are both similar characters, because they both bear the burden of hope in a dark world. Not to mention that sparks are very obviously flying between Michael and Book and the “Coming this season” trailer at the end showed them kissing, so I fear poor Saru will still not get what he wants so very badly. Though I also find it interesting that someone with Michael’s emotionally repressed upbringing tends to go not for straightlaced Federation officers, but rogues and outlaws with a soft centre, whether it’s Klingon pretending to be human Ash Tyler or space rogue with a heart for endangered animals Book. But then Michael’s adoptive Vulcan father Sarek tends to go for human women, because they are emotionally supportive and want to have sex a lot more often than every seven years, so “opposites attract” apparently runs in the family.

But much as I like Michael, I did miss the rest of the Discovery crew and I hope that we will get to see Saru, Tilly, Stamets, Culber, Reno and the bridge crew soon, because they’re all great characters who deserve more to do than the show often gives them. Besides, the show is still called Star Trek Discovery, not Star Trek: The Adventures of Michael Burnham. And Star Trek has always been an ensemble show, as Zack Handlen points out in his review at the AV Club, so the intense focus is unusual for the franchise.

After a rocky first and smoother second season, season 3 of Star Trek Discovery is off to a good start. “That Hope Is You” did what it needed to do and introduced us both to the brave new world in which Michael (and the Discovery crew, once they finally show up) find themselves as well as to the new characters Book and Sahil. And Grudge the cat, of course, for Grudge is awesome.

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