It was time to go on vacation and I was eagerly awaiting an entire week of nothing more demanding to do but read.   I had planned on doing some writing, too, but my laptop never even made it out my bag.   So I packed up my Kobo along with all my other necessities, only to realize after leaving home that I had forgotten to upload the three galleys I had downloaded from netgalley.com.   So when I found myself in a Walmart for a last minute stop at the pharmacy, I also stopped in the book isle, hoping to find something I might like, that was cheep.  When I found The Wise Woman on sale for $9.95, I jumped on it, and finished it in five days.

The Wise Woman is the story of Alys and her ambition.  Taking place in England during Henry VIII’s reign, Alys is abandoned as a baby at the house of the local wise woman, who raises her.   She lives a hard, poor childhood, and is never really loved so when the opportunity comes to raise her station she takes it by becoming a nun.    The story begins when her nunnery is burnt down by the Lord’s son (Catholics being deemed heretics, by Henry VIII), and she flees without trying to save her sisters or mother at the abby, (a truth about her character which plagues her throughout the novel).  She is forced back to the home of the wisewoman, Morag, who raised her, and again grasps at any opportunity to achieve better for herself by becoming healer and scribe to the Lord.   From there, her ambition causes her to plot to rise to lady of the manor.  She breaks her vows, takes the young Lord Hugo as lover and uses ‘dark arts’ to achieve her ends.

This was a great historical fiction, as it’s not very often that authors choose to write about lower classes, in historicals.  The look into the lives of different classes was eye opening and really set the mood for the rest of the novel and causes the reader to empathize with  Alys’ ambitions.

While it’s easy to empathize with Alys, I found it difficult to sympathize.  She’s a difficult character to grow to like because she spends the entire novel deceiving the people who care for her, to get what she wants.   I think that is more difficult to take because she was a nun and made her vows to be a good person, yet at the first challenge she throws all that aside (albeit with some moral struggle).

My favorite part of the novel was the use of ‘dark arts’.  During the time period many people did turn to ‘wise women’ who would use herbal cures, deliver babies and create love spells and such for people who would pay.  These were, of course, not real ‘spells’ but people were very superstitious and witchcraft at the time was a very serious charge.  I would have enjoyed the novel a lot more if it stuck to historical here and made any results of ‘black art’ and women’s mysteries explainable.   It starts out doing just that, however crosses the line with wax dolls that come to life, a miscarried baby made of wax and Morag turning into a rabbit.

The end of the novel also through me for a loop.  Alys spends the entire novel deceiving people to get her way – she’s the highest person in the house after the Lady dies, pregnant with the Lord’s child, and what does she do?  She repents!   After all of that she just turns away from it all.   I think I would have preferred to see her giving birth to a daughter and end up working as the wise woman back in the hovel where she grew up.  It would have been a perfect turn around and counterpoint.  Instead, the moral of the novel becomes about salvation, rather than consequence.

Regardless, I really enjoyed the novel.  The writing drew me in completely and the research was excellent.  I really felt like I understood the time period and the motivations of the different classes, and class structure.   I like how Phillipa Gregory writes and will definitely seek out more of her work.

You can find the novel here:  The Wise Woman

Another of my favorite works of cyberpunk fiction is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Originally published in 1992 Stephenson envisions a 21st century that where the government of the United States has finally ceded all authority to capitalism and the country is now ruled by massive corporations. People live in ‘burbclaves, gated and guarded suburban towns run by corporations that hold their own sovereignty, such as ‘Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong’. Everything, right down to the roads, are run by the corporations that constantly compete for consumers. The US government has been reduced to nothing but a worthless bureaucracy shuffling papers around and wallowing in their own outdated processes.

The novel starts as we meet our main character, the stunningly aptly named Hiro Protagonist, freelance hacker, pizza delivery driver for one of the Mafia run pizza chains, part-time secret agent, and self-proclaimed best swordsman in the universe. Hiro is one of the original programmers of the Metaverse, a virtual reality system that has supplanted the Internet in the future. People jack in and can live out fantasy lives in rendered reality, you can be anything you want to be in the Metaverse as long as you have the money.

Our secondary main character is a streetwise skateboard courier named Y.T. (you don’t find out till well into the book what this stands for and I’m always a little let down that it wasn’t something cooler). Using an electromagnetic harpoon she attaches herself to cars and surfs the traffic to make her deliveries on time.

Together they stumble on a sinister new street drug that is usable both in real life and in the Metaverse called ‘Snow Crash’. Not only just a drug but a computer virus that can infect a persons brain that’s being distributed by a church, franchise of The Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates of course. Behind this stands one of the most powerful men on earth, L. Ron Rife (his name a dig at L. Ron Hubbard who also started a crazy religion). This is where it all starts to get a little weird and existential. The drug is a mimetic/biolinguistic virus created by the Sumerian goddess Asherah and defeated by an ancient neuro-linguistic hacker named Enki. Rife has discovered this virus, and it’s antidote, and is using it to his own ends to control humanity. Hiro is contacted by an ex-girlfriend who’s now deep in Rife’s organization to help stop him. Along the way we meet many interesting characters and Stephenson introduces us to many strange and thought provoking concepts.

Snow Crash, like all of Stephenson’s books can be a bit of a daunting read and you really have to read it a couple of times to get what’s going on. There’s a lot of deep and complex theories about the history of language and the idea of neuro-linguistic hacking and the ability to program the human brain like a computer. As a full-time computer programmer the ideas presented are intriguing, but if you’re not a technical person it could take some time to really get though this book. None the less it is a fun ride and a look at what the future could become if we let the corporations have too much power.

***

Snow Crash

Dune is a book that leaves you wanting more and Frank Hurbert understood this but it still took him four years after Dune’s publication to release the first sequel in what would become a trilogy, Dune Messiah.

Dune Messiah opens twelve years after the thrilling conclusion to Dune and Paul is now emperor of the galaxy and the jihad he saw before him in the first book has come to pass. His Fremen warriors have rampaged across the galaxy imposing their Fremen religion on all the worlds of the empire and proclaimed Maud’dib a living god. While Paul is the greatest power in the galaxy he is unable to stop what has been done in his name and sixy-one billion have perished at the hands of his regime.

Meanwhile, Alia has grown to the edge of adulthood and leads the church from atop her massive palace in the heart of Arakeen. Behind all this a conspiracy is growing with the Bene Gesseret plotting with the Spacing Guild to assassinate Paul and wrest control of the spice away from him. With the help of a Tleilaxu face dancer and the revived body of Duncan Idaho, how a gohla named ‘Hayt’, they launch a plot against him.

Dune Messiah is very much like The Empire Strikes Back, it’s a series of down notes. Paul is trapped into a future he knows with utter perfection, and hates, but is unable to change it. Throughout the story he loses everyone close to him and ultimately himself. His government is corrupt, the Fremen are getting water-fat and rich off the back of a vicious jihad that has reached a fevered pitch and there’s no end in sight. At the end of the novel we get the one bright spot, the birth of Paul’s children (although even this is surrounded by sorrow) and the hope for a new future of the empire.

This novel takes a lot of flack for being too much of a downer, but I think it works as a good counter-point to Dune, in that book we saw the glorious rise of Paul and in this one we see the shame of a foundation that that rise was built upon, he’s not the supreme being we thought he was he can merely see the future he’s trapped into. At only half the length of Dune this is a quick read but still quite satisfying. It’s a great bridge into the next novel in the original trilogy Children of Dune.

Pick it up, enjoy it.

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Dune Messiah

After discussing Willow, last Monday, I got to thinking about my most favorite movie and it’s novel.    I am a lot more familiar with the movie, having watched it enough times to have most of the lines memorized, but I’ve only read the novel once.  Does this mean that I’ve finally found a book where I actually prefer the movie?   Perhaps.

The fact is that this movie has garnered a huge cult following, mainly because of it’s wit and one liners, but also because of it’s incredible characters and the actors that portrayed them.   There is a divide in the fan community, however, between those that prefer the novel and those that prefer the movie.   Novel lovers tend to look down on movie lovers, in some sort of elitist way, as if those who have only seen the movie haven’t been let in on the whole story.

The truth is that the movie follows the plot of the book so perfectly, that nothing is lost there – there are no missed plot lines or unmentioned background, like there was between the Willow movie and novel.   The one biggest difference between the movie and the novel is the style of narration.   I’m particularly fond of the movie’s convention of having the grandfather read the story to his sick grandson.  Fred Savage provides an excellent counterpart of the kid who finds romance and kissing disgusting, but it won over in the end.

The book on the other hand, claims to be originally written by S. Morgenstern, and abridged and commented on by William Goldman.  This is, however a fiction in itself.  Similiar to the fictional author of Memoirs of a Geisha, S. Morgenstern doesn’t exist. The abridgment is a rather clever part of the novel, a way for the author  comment on and internally narrate his own work.   I enjoyed this aspect of the novel, it was clever in a ‘pop up video’ kind of way, but it did get distracting from time to time, and occasionally got in the way of the story.

The William Goodman is so good at fiction that even his author biography is fictional, as are references to a deleted scene and a sequel, supposedly called Buttercups Baby.   He is so successful in his deception, that many of the susceptible are deceived into believing that S. Morgenstern actually existed, a fact that many of the die hard novelists love gloating over.

What really matters, however, is not which medium is the better way to experience the story, or who is smarter for appreciating its different forms, it’s the fact that the story transfered into movie so effectively as to have such a devoted following.

“No more rhyming now, I mean it!”  ”Anybody want a peanut?”

Get the movie here:  The Princess Bride (1987)

and the novel here:  The Princess Bride

Ahh….this brings me back.   I think I was 18 when I first read this book; the age when you feel so old, but you’re really so young.   This book is sentimental favorite of mine, because it came into my life just when I was rediscovering myself, and creating an identity separate from my home and family.   I was on my own and independent and responsible for my own ideas and beliefs.   I think I even felt a little rebellious.

So I first picked up this book not very far into my new found Pagan faith.   I had been interested in witches since high school and discovered Wicca and Paganism in university, going so far as to head the Goddess 2000 group in my area and create the Society of Pagan Fellowship student group on campus.    I know, it all sounds so fruity  (I can hear my huband’s eyes rolling in their sockets”) but it was my identity then; it was newborn, bright, gleaming and proud.

This book took the classic Arthurian legend and turned it on his head.   It took the story away from the male-centric myth that everyone knows and made it about the Goddess and her Priestesses and Druids and the mystical, magical Avalon struggling to exist in a world of new faith.    It was like the novel was speaking to my own transformation – trying to exist as Pagan in a Christian world (campus).    What was amazing to me was the pagan rituals, festivals and rites written as if they actually happened, and how they were slowly extinguished by the Roman legions and the modernization of Britain, through kings.    The book was read so many times that I’m surprised it’s held together.   I can’t speak now about how good the writing was, (though I do know the mini series was horribly cheesy) but I will say that the images are still strong in my mind.

The sequels and other historical fiction that came after this book I can imagine as  representations of my own growth and maturity in my beliefs and even in life.   Each book that emerged became more sophisticated and learned more away from magic and myth and attempted to recreate history from a feminine point of view.  I read them all, always eager for the next in the series, but none of them affected me like the first book did.  Maybe it’s just my mind trying to cling to those young fresh years.

I read The Firebrand last year and it did a wonderful job of demonstrating the roll women could have had in history, as it tells the story of the fall of Troy from Kassandra’s perspective.   It almost seemed to me to be the culminating story of my own beliefs – the history of Troy, it’s cultures and peoples are all examined from a probable point of view, with just a little bit of old school mysticism on the side.

Everyone once in a while, though, it’s nice to go back to your roots.  So, go here to find The Mists of Avalon.

I’ve mentioned before, in my post of favorite Canadian authors, that I really enjoy Margaret Atwood’s work.  So, when I saw this book on the shelf, (it instantly caught my attention by the cover) I very nearly bought it right then, before remembering I have an ereader and rushing home to buy it on the computer.

The synopsis given on the back, and that Kobo books gives it, just doesn’t do the novel justice.   On the surface The Year of the Flood is the stories of two women as they live the final years up to and beyond the destruction of man kind, in a religious-environmental cult called God’s Gardeners, who have predicted the end of mankind in a ‘waterless flood’.

Ren’s story, told in first person, covers her childhood growing up with the gardners and how she ends up working for Scales and Tales, a sexclub run by Seksmart, where she dances and works the trapeze.   Toby’s story, told in third person, starts with the death of her mother and suicide of her father, and her subsequent flight from the compound and disappearance into the exfernal world, where she works for Secretburger (the secret is what meat is in the burger). She is physically and sexually abused by the manager, a violent monster with high connections, before being rescued by the gardeners.  Their stories intersect when Toby becomes a teacher for the gardeners children, including Ren.

Most of the novel is spent on the women’s past stories, but the chapters jump back and forth between current events in Year 25 (of the Gardeners), and the years that have past until the women meet up again.  At this point the story moves forward as the two women travel together, through a post apocalyptic world,  and meet up with people they knew from their days with the Gardeners.

Beyond the story, Atwood creates a marvelously descriptive and complex religious structure for the Gardeners, based around chapters of sermons given by Adam One, the leader, and songs from the ‘oral hymbook’.   In the beginning of the novel, these sections seem quaint, but not significant to the story, so it was tempting just to skim through the sermon and skip the songs.  However, as time goes on, these sermons reveal the life of the Gardners and their hardships, including sermons after they are persecuted and forced to flee their garden.  The sermons after the Flood are particularity poignant as the reader is shown that most of the Gardeners have died in their flight.  In the end, Adam One has little hope of their survival, however maintains his beatific devotion to God and God’s purpose.   These segments beg the question of if this book is actually a religious commentary on the state of the world, where it is headed and the power we have to change a possibly bleak future.

I was so surprised and disappointed when this novel ended that I had to go back (remember I’m on an ereader that doesn’t tell me how many pages are left) and make sure that I hadn’t hit a wrong button and missed entire chapters some how.    The ending was left hanging in such a way that it begs for a sequel.   I want to know what happens to Toby, Amanda, Ren and Jimmy.  I want to see what happens with the new world.

Desperate for answers I went to Amazon looking for any word of sequels, only to find that The Year of the Food is the sequel; sort of.  According to  Margaret Atwood’s own words on the novel, she wrote this novel because so many people asked her what happened after her previous novel, Oryx and Crake, the story of Jimmy and Glen at the end of the world.  Well, now I have to go read that one!

The reason that this novel is so good is because it seems so simple, but is amazingly heartfelt and complex.  The societal and economical structure of the world, along with varying beliefs and morals create an incredible mixture of culture under the surface of ordinary lives of seemingly simple yet extraordinary characters.  It was a pleasure to read.

You can find it here:   The Year of the Flood

I have a few favorite movies from childhood which remain favorites today, and I’m not alone in this, seeing as how they’ve all gained a sort of cult following.   My all time favorite is The Princess Bride, a book to movie combo that I suspect I’ll get further into some other day.  The other two, running a close race for second on my favorite movies list, are Labyrinth and Willow.

I was ten years old when this movie came out, and I’ve loved it ever since.  The films virtues changed over the years as I got older, but in a nut shell is has magic, action, humor, romance, suspense and excellent, diverse characters.  You can’t go wrong with fairies, mischievous brownies, evil and good sorceresses,  valiant, yet flawed heroes, a baby with a destiny and her diminutive guardian.   The movie even includes an evil warrior princes who is brought over to the good side through love.

What’s not to like about this movie?!  Apparently there’s a lot because the movie flopped at the theaters, and only gained a following when out of theaters, probably through other kids like me.   My husband still maintains that he doesn’t like it, but then he doesn’t like Labyrinth, either, so there’s no accounting for his taste.

Somewhere a long the line, possibly in a second hand book store, I discovered that there was also a book, Willow: The Novel.   I had no idea until doing research for this post,which came first, the movie or the novel, but I always assumed it was the novel.  I was wrong.   Wayland Drew was responsible for the novelization of the movie.   Usually an author writes a book and the movie is created, which is never as good as the book.   With this novel, it was backward; the movie was created, then the book, which was still better than the movie.

As much as I like the movie, I still like the novel better because the novel goes into history and explanations that the movie never really covers, or glosses over.  For example, we find out that the ruler of the doomed city of Tir Asleen, where Willow and Elora are supposed to find refuge, was actually ruled by Scorsha’s father, who was King. We find out Bavmorda’s history, how she became an evil sorcerous because she was jealous of a rival and wanted more and more power.    Eventually, Bavmorda, turned evil by her lust for power,  destroyed the city, freezing everyone into stone.

In the novel, this explains Scorsha’s desertion of the army, when she discovers her father, red-headed as she is, and begins to remember her childhood.  In the movie, we never really find out what Tir Asleen was, except that it was frozen by Bavmorda, and the spell broken at her death.  At the end of the movie, we do see Scorsha and Madmartigan waving from the castle of Tir Asleen, obviously taking up the raising of Elora, and presumably ruling of the city, but there’s no explanation of why that’s possible.

While I’m happy that I got the extra detail from the novel, I would still recommend it more as a companion to the movie, rather than advising to read the novel instead of watching the movie.  The movie’s a cult classic, and by not seeing it you’d be missing out on a lot of antics and action that, being visually appealing, the book doesn’t have.

Unfortunately, the novel is now out of print, but there are plenty of used copies available on Amazon.   Otherwise, you can find the movie here: Willow (1988)

I’ve been a lover of book series ever since I was a kid.   When I was in elementary school I remember reading the Sweet Valley High and The Babysitter Club books; I wanted to be those girls, so badly!  I even tried creating my own Babysitter’s Club, that failed completely.

In Junior high I fell in love with V.C. Andrews and read all of her series up until they were publishing her unpublished works after her death.  Even then, I felt like there was a reason they had been unpublished, and it’s kinda sad when people take advantage of an artist’s death just to make more money.   Then there was the Clan of the Cave Bear books, which I (scandalously) found in the high school library.  There was a bit of an uproar about that, if I recall correctly.  That’s one series that doesn’t really belong in the categoy of fun childhood reads, though, cuz I’m still eager for the publication of the latest novel.

I’ve blogged about some of my favorite series on the blog before, but they’ve always been series that I would go back and re-read, because they remain timeless, to me.  For a change, I decided to write about my very first favorite series, that while completely absorbing at the time, attempts to go back to it have failed. While all of the series listed above were good books, none of them captured my attention like the works of David Eddings.

It was during the summer after I graduated from high school that my aunt brought me a box of books from a garage sale, containing all four fantasy series, available at the time: The Belgariad, and it’s sequel The Mallorian, The Elenium, and The Tamuli.  In a period of two weeks I managed to read all 18 novels, and then I went to the library and tracked down his two other novels, High Hunt and The Losers.   Looking back, it was David Eddings who turned me onto Fantasy books, and after him I went through a period when I read almost nothing but fantasy.  It’s still a favorite genre, but I’m branch out a lot more, now.

What loved about them was that for the first time I was transported into a world whereanything was possible.  Magic (which I was fascinated with) was made as simple as will and command.   Even today, ordering my word through my will is one of my most ardent wishes.  I also found the characters to be very real and endearing.  Polgara was my most favorite and I was thrilled to find an entire book on her history, and Belgarath was the friendly grandfather figure that I really missed in my teen years.

In my first few years of university I jumped on the Eddings’ newest releases, but for some reason, the magic was gone for me.   This didn’t just appeal to the newest series, Dreamers, either.   I recommended the Belgariad to my boyfriend at the time (now my husband)  and I don’t think he even got through the first book.  I tried to read them again, and what held me rapt for two weeks that one summer just wasn’t there.  I found the books to be simple, slow and a little juvenile and to be honest it made me sad; it was like discovering there’s no Santa Claus.

David Eddings was once quoted as saying, ”I am here to teach a generation or two how to read. After they’ve finished with me and I don’t challenge them any more, they can move on to somebody important like Homer or Milton.”   Maybe that’s what happened to me; I grew up and went on to more challenging and more sophisticated novels, although, that could be arguable.  

Regardless, I will always look upon the Eddings’ series fondly, as old friends, and maybe I’ll come back to them again, some day.  I’ll also continue to suggest them to new readers of fantasy, or even as YA fiction, because they are good books.   I couldn’t have been drawn to them fin the first place, if they weren’t.    I think that if David Eddings’ goal was to teach a generation to appreciate fiction, then he was successfull.   I just learned, in my research for this article, that he died in June 2009, and I think that he can rest now, comfortable in knowing that he was successful, not just for his writing, but for opening up worlds to thousands of readers.

Since my husband is fresh out of short story ideas,  I took pity of him and opened up my writing file.   The only thing I felt was really worth posting (a lot of my stuff sucks, apparently), was this story that I started three or more years ago and never finished, until now, although I still feel that there’s more story in it.    It’s based on a character that I played in the mmorpg Eve Online, and takes place in the Eve universe.    This is almost my first attempt at writing science fiction.

****

My name is Kyrana. My last name isn’t important, well unless you’re my parents or relatives or the entire Gallente federation. I am the only daughter of the ruling house of the Gallente people – the Gallente’s being one of the first houses to colonize Eve, a galaxy cut off from Solaris and Earth by a collapsed wormhole. The Archivists say that we’re decedents of Earth’s French people, whatever that means.

Anyway, like I said, I am the only daughter of the ruling house of Gallente. I have two older brothers, both being raised and prepared to run Gallente space when my parents choose not be cloned any longer. My job as the only daughter, is to get married. Rumor has it that they want me married to a Caldari, to bring the two peoples closer together and ease tensions between them.

I did go to school, however, to gain some basic skills to help me do what was required of me. It wasn’t the school that my parents picked for me. The Federal Navy Academy isn’t exactly a charm school. That’s where things went wrong, for my parents at least. I fell in love with flying. I loved being in a pod and connected to a ship. My mother, a properly raised Gallente Lady, was understandably horrified. Understandably, because a real “lady” should never want to immerse herself in biogenic goo and hardwire her body to the computer of a ship.

They could have lived with that, though. They could see it being an amusing hobby, and useful if it really came down to it. What they really objected to were the people I met and the friends I made. Especially men. For someone who is to marry in order to unite two peoples, meeting men is frowned upon. Unless, of course, they are politically influential.

The day I graduated from the Academy and was given my first ship, a rookie ship called a Velator, was one of the best days of my life. I had at my fingertips, well directly connected to my brain, actually, the means to my freedom; to a life I could create for myself without anyone else telling me what was right, or proper, or my duty.

I spent the next month flying around Gallente space, doing courier missions for agents, running training complexes and training up skills, until I had enough ISK to buy and insure my very first frigate, my Tristan. By then, the thrill of the kill…chasing down pirates had gotten into my blood and I started to do kill missions for agents and hunt down pirates in the astroid belts.

It didn’t take long before that wasn’t enough for me, and I wanted more than I could handle on my own. I needed a corp. I got lucky when I found one that was taking graduates, usually they aren’t willing to train, and hire only based on experience, skill and implants. Sometimes you can buy your way into them. So, I started out in the Carbide Industries Initiate Academy, and I was trained by a Caldari named Xeserox. He was a veteran of low sec space, and fought in two wars. He was loyal, tough, and I’d become accustomed to asking how high, when he said jump.

Like today. I was sleeping in the hangar when an emergency broadcast went out across all ships belonging to the corp. It was an Urgent message for all ships to respond to a 0.0 section of space. That’s as low security as you can get – no gate guns, pirates guaranteed to jump you and nearly everyone’s a wanted criminal. I don’t go below 0.5 security, because as much as I love the thrill of the hunt and the kill, I’m not stupid and I don’t want to be cloned. I like my original body, so I avoid it. They call me a Care Bear. Yeah, I talk tough, but when the hunt gets truly dangerous I get nervous.

Coordinates were immediately provided, and a quick check at the nav-map showed that it was only ten jumps away from my current headquarters at the Atari II space station. My mind hovered over the launch command, hesitating, and I could feel my heart pounding and my respiration beginning to climb. “Anyone know what’s going on?” I sent over the comm line.

“Command demands radio silence” was the instant response, flashing red in front of my eyes. “Just get your ass to the coordinates.”

With a deep breath, and a thought, I sent the signal to open hangar gates and nudged my ship outside, hovering in the protective bubble of its shields. To my left, an identical pair of doors opened and a familiar ship slid into view, accelerated and was gone before I could blink. Green text floated in my field of vision, and I could almost hear the half laughing, half gloating voice of Valeria, “Common Kyr, lets kill something! Meet you at the gate!”

That got me moving. In an instant, coordinates to the low sec space were imputed into my nav-computer, and I was flying through space and jumping through gates. There is no way to describe the ecstasy of symbiosis with the power of a ship. I can only imagine that this is what the birds back on Gallente feel like, as they race across the sky; their bodies soaring, turning on a dime, diving for prey. My entire body thrumbed with power, eager for release; shooting at something was nearly orgasmic.

It was very easy to see how people could go rogue or turn into pirates, getting pleasure out of hunting down and destroying other ships. The only difference between them and me was that I still had a conscience.

The next thing I knew I was hovering at the last gate in safe space. I still felt super charged, as if pumped full of electricity, but on top of it all I felt like I had been drenched in ice water. If I went through this gate, I could die. Valeria was already gone, and radio silence meant I couldn’t contact her. Blips on my map showed that corp members were amassed in space three jumps away, so close that I could almost reach out and touch them…and yet…

“Xeserox?” I silently messaged, praying for an answer.

“Sup?” he blinked back, “are you on the way?”

“Umm…” my hesitation translated itself on the screen.

“We need everyone we can get, Kyr, you can do this. I trained you to do it, now get your ass in here.”

“Yes sir!” I responded, closing the chat. Then I jumped.

As difficult as it is to describe the sensation of being melded to your ship, jumping is even more so, yet completely different. It’s kinda like, when your hand falls asleep and you get pins and needles, except it’s all over your body and you feel like it’s gonna tear it apart. Then, just when you can’t stand it anymore, you’re at the other gate. It always takes a little while to orient yourself, and for your computer to get a bead on what’s in the area. This is the most dangerous part of flight, especially in low sec space, with no military protection or turret guns to target high bounty ships.

So, when I could see again, and realized I was still I alive, I took a deep breath of relief and then ran like hell to the next gate. They can’t shoot you when you’re on route. It’s the only way to get away from a pirate that’s after you. If you drop out of hyperspace half way between destinations, you might get lucky and lose them, but otherwise you run from planet to planet, until you find a station you can hide in. Then you hope they go away.

Xeserox told me, once, that I shouldn’t worry so much about being shot down. “You’ll always clone back” he said, “no big deal. So you lose a few implants, but you’re not gonna die, at least, not permanently.” I always told him it’s not myself I worry about, it’s my ship. I don’t wanna lose my ship. I’m not sure how honest I was being.

So, after all my imaginings of being blown to smithereens, imagine my surprise when I jumped into the last gate in 0.0 space, as listed on my coordinates, to be met with nothing but debris. There were canisters all over the place; a quick scan showed they were full of weapons, ammo and some ore. There was nothing on my screen, no friendlies and no blinking, beeping read dots, thankfully. “What the hell?” I said to myself, rotating on the spot, checking the space around me for anything I missed. “Do I have the right coordinates? Maybe I’m at the wrong gate.”

“Hey, guys?” I sent out a message, “is the radio silence still on? I”m at the coordinates and there’s nothing here.”

Silence.

“Hello?” I send out again.

“Kyrana! RUN!” The words flashed bright in my vision just as a wave of ships materialized right above my head, from the gate. They were all blinking red.

I gunned up my engines and made a desperate run for the gate, keying the launch sequence, praying no one had seen me. There was a flash of light, a hot red rush of energy and the feeling of pins and needles, only multiplied to the point that I felt a scream rip out of my throat, only to be enveloped in complete, sensory deprivation blackness.

I don’t know how long it took to recover, but I do know that “Shit,”was the first word I spoke in my new body, back in Gallente. My mother was not impressed.

Today we review a 115 year old book, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Written in 1895 it was one of the first works to explore the idea of time travel.  It’s told from the point of view of a friend of the main character, identified only as The Time Traveller, who is retelling the story at a later date (presumably to the reader).

The story opens with a group of friends gathering at The Time Traveller’s house where The Time Traveller is detailing his ideas on time travel to his friends. He then wows the assembled group by producing a small model of the machine he has devised and sends it winging off though time. The following week the group gathers together again only to find The Time Traveller late for dinner, when he does finally emerge from his workshop he’s disheveled and has an amazing story to tell.

The Time Traveler details his travels far forward in time to the year 802,701 where he’s found humanity has evolved into a two separate races, a peaceful and happy race of stunted surface dwellers called the Eoli and a deformed race of underground cannibals called the Morlocks. The Time Traveler theorizes that humanity has ended up in this state due to technological advancement that allowed the people of the surface world to live an ‘toil-free’ existance while the underground workers kept their surface machines alive and they eventually evoloved into monsters that fed on the flesh of the Eoli.

The Morlocks steal The Time Travelers machine and he must recover it from them in a somewhat anti-climactic battle and he flings himself forward some 30 million years into the future to watch the death of the earth before he finally comes back to his workshop and relates the tale to his friends.

Since this novel, it’s quite short, a novella really, is so old the language is quite archaic but it doesn’t detract much from the story and Wells evokes powerful imagery of a far distant future. While much of what Wells describes for the future of mankind, and his ideas about how time and space work, misses the mark based on what we know about science these days his ideas are none-the-less interesting and insightful. In the end this work of fiction is a great look at both history and the origins of science fiction and a very entertaining read.

Best of all, since it’s 115 years old it’s WELL out of copyright so can be downloaded for free from all over the place. The copy I read was from Project Guetenburg and very well edited and formatted. You can grab your own copy below. Enjoy

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The Time Machine