A New Take On A Well Established Premise

Listen folks, I know some of you are going to point fingers and scream about the physical impossibility of real world Faster Than Light travel. I'm not convinced that you're right, because, although science says it can't be done, science screws up all the time. Seriously, it was scientifically proven that woman couldn't travel on trains because their wombs would come flying out of their body and that no human being could travel faster than the speed of sound without suffocating. 

And anyway, who cares, we're talking about Science Fiction here! FTL travel happens all the time!

So listen, here's what I'm thinking:

Yes, Star Trek has Warp Drive. Yes, Star Wars has Lightspeed. Honor Harrington has hyper. I'm told that Warhammer 40K burns psychics, but I haven't read the books. I need to start. Event Horizon had that spiky, ball thing. Stargate has the star gate. Battlestar Galactica has a jump drive, as does Battletech. The Four Horsemen Universe has a pretty unique take on both gate technology, similar to the gates in Babylon 5, and hyperspace that has to be seen to be believed. 

I could go on for days. Honestly, I'm still debating whether Stargate really counts or not, too but that's not the point.

The point is that we need one concrete thing we can ask about. One all-powerful, overarching concept that can get us into the nitty-gritty of what we love. Because, honestly, if all we wanted was action and cool characters we'd be reading Tom Clancy instead of David Weber. (That's not a slam against Tom Clancy. Dude can flat out write. I'm just saying that he doesn't have the fancy window dressing we're used to as fans of SF/F.) What we need is the Fwoosh button.

Yep, I said it. The Fwoosh button.

Think about it this way:

When Sulu, takes the ship to warp, he's pressing the Fwoosh Button. When Ivanova orders the White Star Fleet through a gate, she's pushing the Fwoosh Button. When Jim Carthwright takes the Cavaliers through the gate and into hyperspace, he's pressing the Fwoosh Button. When Han Solo takes the Millennium Falcon to Lightspeed, he's hitting the Fwoosh Button, Well, probably. I mean, it's the Falcon and it kinda only works when it wants to, but you know what I mean. Actually, he's hitting the Fwoosh Button either way. Sometimes it just doesn't work. The bottom line here is that when your favorite character does whatever they do to get things moving quickly, they're hitting the Fwoosh Button. 

Instead of referring to FTL travel as FTL travel, and having to ask, "How do they do Faster Than Light?" every time somebody tells you about a new series, you just say, "How does the Fwoosh button work?" or "Describe the Fwoosh Button."

Your life will thus have been greatly enhanced and simplified by the saving of several seconds that you would otherwise have spent speaking a longer phrase that you no longer need to speak because I have provided you with a way to shorten your sentences, save your breath and eschew obsfucation by using a singularly concise term with which I have provided you free of charge and with no hope of recompense simply out of my magnanimity as a human being and through my deep and abiding care for the well-being of all around me combined with my confirmed affection for brevity and all of its benefits.

Seriously folks, keep it short if you can. It is of utmost importance to express your meaning in as few words as possible as this will allow your audience to understand the maximum amount of words that you have spoken because you have refused to confuse them with an overabundance of verbiage. This is desirable for many reasons.

So...

The Fwoosh Button is important. It will save you time.

I like this concept, because, at least among stories that involve faster than light travel, it's all encompassing. When you're describing a new book/show/movie/series to a friend you can just say, "Then he hit the Fwoosh Button" when describing what happened in the book instead of trying to walk some goofball through the 9780768768687687968976789689768968976789698768969876986987696 steps behind engaging a Warshawski Sail and setting off into hyper. There will also be no need to explain military compensators, Alpha nodes, Beta nodes, hyperspace bands, hyper limits...

Yeah, Fwoosh button that stuff and you're good. 

Okay, so Honorverse fans are either laughing or offended right now. The rest of you are confused. I'm trying to help avoid all of  the confusion by moving everything forward in a conversation using the Fwoosh Button. Seriously. Try it.

Art Spiegelman's Maus I: My Father Bleeds History and Maus II: A Survivors Tale: And Here My Troubles Began

So, I picked up copies of Art Spiegleman's Maus and Maus II. I've been meaning to read both for years and I finally got around to it. It was weird though, because I went to my Local Comic Shop to get a copy of Maus right when the controversy hit and the owner of the place had never heard of it. Barnes and Noble, however, was more than willing to provide me with a copy of the first graphic novel and The Zekleman Holocaust Center was more than happy to sell me one from their souvenir store. From here on in, I'll be referring to both collectively as simply Maus.

On an entertainment level, I was impressed. Spiegleman had my attention for the entire time I was reading it. Dude can seriously tell a story. He also told the story of not just the his father surviving through the Holocaust, but of both his and his father's lives as they were working through the writing of the tale. It was masterfully done. Flashback is definitely a strong suit for Spiegleman.

The art was also well done. I'm not usually a big fan of black and white art in comic books/graphic novels in general, but Maus is not exactly your everyday comic fare. The Holocaust itself was both dark and gritty. The art matches it perfectly. Or maybe that's just me.

When I did my Capstone Paper at Oakland University I wrote about the involvement of the Heer, the German Army, in the Holocaust. Over the course of a semesters worth of research, I saw a lot of pictures of the carnage, all of them in black and white. All of those pictures were in black and white and some still haunt me. Either way though, the art in Maus matches with my impressions of the events themselves. 

Speigleman's father definitely went through many things that no human being should ever have to endure. Maus is a testament both to the cruelty and depravity of the Germans and to the strength and stamina of those who survived. Vladek Spiegelman is hard core. I don't know if I could survive what he went through but he did. 

I can't imagine what it must have been like for Art Spiegleman to have conducted those interviews or for Vladek to have went through them. Once, when I was really young, I asked my great-uncle why his eye didn't move. It turns out that his eye was made of glass and had been forced upon him by an unfriendly member of the Japanese military while he was fighting in the Pacific. I'll never forget the way everyone present looked at me, or the way my Aunt Maisie, who had been married to him for literal decades at that point said that she had never heard him talk about the war before. It was years before I realized how terrible the memories that I had dredged up were.

Art Spiegleman found a way to milk memories that were just as bad or worse from his father. I don't know what it took to get it out of the old man, but it must've been near impossible just to get him to open up. Whatever it was, or whatever it took, Art Spiegleman did it. I've got a lot of respect for that because I know it wasn't easy. What Vladek went through reliving all of that was probably even worse, so props to both of them for getting through what they had to get through. The University of Michigan has a program for people to testify to what they lived through and saw during the Holocaust as well. 

Maus is a truly realistic look at what happened during the Holocaust. Vladek Spiegleman was a man who did whatever he could do to get through the Holocaust. It didn't matter what it was. It didn't matter what the rules said. He was going to make it if it was at all possible and he was determined not to die trying. I've got more respect for Vladek Spiegleman than probably any other purely human being in history but what he did was frequently against the rules. Granted, they were rules made by the Nazis, but any one of the violations that saved his life could have killed him. That's courage right there, folks and he had it in spades. 

I'm glad something like Maus came along. It's important to show the world what happened, how it happened and what it took to survive the Holocaust. I've also reviewed Marvel's X-Men: Magneto: Testament. Of course, I'm aware that many people have also seen Schindler's List. I know I've seen it many times. And, while Schindler's List may be the one exception of the three to what I'm about to say, these works should not be in classrooms to students who do not already have an education in the Holocaust.

That's not to say that Maus does not have literary value, because it has immense literary value. A lot of other books do too, and most of them aren't about the Holocaust. I've heard people talk about/ seen people write about the importance of Maus and its position as the only way to truly understand the emotional impact of the Holocaust on its victims. With respect, those people need to do more reading. There are many books available that have been written by Holocaust victims, not the least of which is Primo Levi's Survival In Auschwitz.

And no, I'm not saying we should ban Maus. I own copies of both books, and I've actually purchased both for my oldest daughter, Riley. The important here being that when I bought her Maus,  I also bought her books about the Holocaust in general and Terezin and Ravensbruck. I made sure she had the education to go along with the entertainment because I don't want her to think that the Holocaust is just some bullshit from a fucking comic book.

Students in North America and Europe have both been polled and it has been found that large percentages of young people believe that the Holocaust is either a myth or has been exaggerated. My own niece once asked me why people believe that it happened. I've had conversations with people who believe this way. And, while I will go to my death (hopefully many years from now) confident in my belief that this is the opposite of what Art Spiegleman intended, I believe that Maus, Testament, and other, similar works are a large part of the reason why.

Listen folks, everyone knows that comic books are not factually true. Yes, even those of us who read them for pleasure acknowledge the fact that fiction is fiction. That is precisely why choosing to teach history using graphic novels is the wrong thing to do. If the lessons of the Holocaust are forgotten teaching Maus in classrooms may well be one of the reasons that it does so. I get the fact that it won't be the only reason. Neo-nazis and other Anti-Semites have their own agenda and love using Holocaust denial as a possible reason to massacre the Jews in Israel now and I get that, but there's no reason to help the enemy.

For the record though, my objection has nothing to do with Southern people and their problem with mouse tiddies. That I don't have a problem with. 

Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Celebrated Survivors

Maus I, Maus II and a couple of works of Holocaust history are available at the links below. If you click the links and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage of your purchase at no additional cost to you.

D.T. Read's Apprentice to the Gods The Seventh Shaman, Book Four

 (Author's note: D.T Read will still be getting her review as part of my Memorial Day Event. I know that I had originally promised it would be this book but I got excited and jumped the gun. She has another series out, The Sergey Chronicles, and I'll be reviewing book one from that series instead. Oops.)

So I'm totally going to review D.T. Read's Apprentice to the Gods without every third word being a spoiler.

Totes.

Watch me go.

I'm all over this.

Well, at least "all over." 

Seriously, this is a REALLY good book but how do you not spoil too much?

Okay so I've reviewed the first three books. For purposes of this review, I'm going to assume you've read the first three. If you haven't. hie thee off to the two links listed above and then go read the books. I'll wait.

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

Okay. ARE YOU DONE YET? Sheesh. I gave you at least five seconds there.

And I never, and I mean ever, put this this early in the review but don't read Apprentice to the Gods as a standalone. This book is part of a series and it really only works that way. That's not to say it's not a good book, because it's amazeballs,  It is to say that ATTG is awesome in large part because of how well it connects with what has come before. It also works (at least it feels like it does) as a bridge to the rest of the series.

There are certain moments in certain series where the entire story turns on that one moment. The death of Sturm Brightblade in The Dragonlance Chronicles comes to mind. So does "No Luke, I am your father." for the original Star Wars trilogy. Apprentice to the Gods contains that moment for this series, I think. I mean, the last three (at least! WHO ELSE IS EXCITED?!?!?!?!?!??) books of the Seventh Shaman haven't come out yet and I could be dead wrong, but it was definitely _a_ turning point even if it wasn't _the_ turning point.

Something big happens though, and it changes the trajectory of Ku's life. Maybe for the better, maybe for the worse, but it'll never be the same. It's definitely not all bad though. Ku is a man with a destiny and he knows it. Ku needs training outside of what he received from the military and he gets it but I'm damn sure that not everything he needed to know and learned can be termed as "training."

Ku, like many other men throughout history, became a father for the first time while serving a combat deployment. He ends up at home for his first extended period of time since that happen in Apprentice to the Gods. He honestly hadn't been married for all that long before he deployed either. What this translates into is a man who needs to learn how to live in a family as a husband and father. And the military, or so I've been told, doesn't do much to prepare its troops to deal with these kinds of tasks. He does about as well with his first diaper as I did though. I'll give him that much. Then again, there's a reason why my oldest daughter had the nicknames Stink and Poops while she was a baby.

She'll kill me if she reads that. 

Pray for me.

For what it's worth though, Ku is a good dad and does as much of the stuff that I've been told multiple times that men don't do as I did when I was married and lived with my kids. Well, except that we had disposable diapers. Thankfully, I didn't have to deal with THAT.

Things are going well for Ku in the sense of his immediate family, but not on the macro scale. There is a lot going on that may very well end up requiring his military skills. I'm only seventy percent sure of that at this point, but I'd be shocked if I'm wrong. There is a fight brewing and I'm not sure how big it's going to be, but I'm guessing somewhere between huge and gigundus. And yes, gingundus is a word. I just made it up.

And it's serious because Ku has some serious religious obligations coming up too, and they're likely to require a whole bunch of his family and military skills. There are shades of prophecy involved here and it's not always clear what is literal and what isn't. Ku has a lot riding on his shoulders. I don't think I'd want some of his responsibilities. I'm not sure he does. What he does have though is guts and to spare. He's a man that is stuck in a situation he can't get out of and does what is required of him BECAUSE it is required of him. That's all anyone can ask I guess, and I find it utterly realistic and understandable.

I'm thinking his religious training benefits from his military training in ways that may not be apparent until you think about it, but it makes sense. As a matter of fact, I think it might be the only way to make some of it make sense. Military training is conducted at a high rate of speed and things are condensed into the smallest amount of time they can take up and still be useful. Ku, and his wife Derry, get a lot of that in Apprentice to the Gods. That makes sense because she's military too, but they have to learn a lot in a short amount of time. Anyone who has been through Basic Training knows how that feels. 

And Ku also ends up being an imperfect human being. He makes one very serious mistake in the book that almost costs him one of the most important things in his life and it hurts him. It hurts him bad and it makes him do what he should have done previously. He learns from it though, and I'm thinking that will stand him as well in books to come as it does in this one. 

If you're annoyed by the fact that I keep bringing up future boks in The Seventh Shaman just know that it doesn't annoy me at all. That's because I'm geeked up on this series and can't wait to find out what's next. Unfortunately, I may have to wait longer for the next one as I'm told that it may be up to a year before it's out.

Don't worry about me though. I won't cry about it.

Much.

Probably.

Or at least not in public.

Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Chants

Apprentice to the Gods The Seventh Shaman, Book Four

D.T. Read

Theogony Press, 2023

Apprentice to the Gods The Seventh Shaman, Book Four is available at the following link. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.

Science Fiction, Fantasy and Gateways

I started into the world of Science Fiction early, with Star Trek  and Star Wars. (For the record, I eschew the whole Trek vs. Wars debate. They're both amazingly awesome and that's the end of that.) My first four friends, and I believe I've mentioned this here before, were named James T. Kirk, Leonard McCoy, Spock and Mike Boldt. He lived around the block from me.

My first experience with Star Trek was when my mom took me to the movies to see Return of the Jedi. She knew I'd love it. I was six and it was great. Green dudes, guys in funky robes, giant ugly worm, things, and a woman in a really sexy outfit that I was too young to properly enjoy made my day. As I got older, I watched the first two, then got them on VHS, then went to see the Specials Editions...

Yeah I was hooked. I actually got into Star Trek at an even earlier age.

I watched my first episode of Star Trek the day my parents brought me home from the hospital, or so my old man used to say. I have no clear recollection having been a couple of days old at the time, but that's what I was told. Watching that set me on an adventure at the library: I searched for works of Science Fiction. I checked all of the old log books out of the library and started looking for other stuff. 

It wasn't long before the librarian at the local public library handed me a copy of Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy. I spent the next twenty-five years trying to find that book and remember what the name of the author was. By the time I wandered on to the old Baen's Bar forum site, I figured I'd be lucky if anyone even recognized it. Oops. Way to go, Jimbo. That book is an SF classic. But how did I know that? I was just a kid when I read it, and neither of parents read SF, so they couldn't help.

You all get to listen to me blather on about my love of Science Fiction literature because that came from watching TV and the movies. One day Star Trek, the next day Heinlein and then some Asimove (I picked Robots and Empire up at a used book table at a rummage sale.) and then just random stuff until I happened upon a Catherine Asaro novel and started following her. (It occurs to me that she deserves a review here. I don't think I've done one. Oops.) And then, one day, someone came along and mentioned this Weber guy and his Honor Harrington series and there was Baen..

Yeah, it was fate.

And yes, I get that Star Wars is Science Fantasy NOW. I didn't then. See the next paragraph.

With fantasy, it was a little different. I didn't really know there was such a thing as a fantasy genre. See, I'm a certified fogey and borderline curmudgeon. When I was a kid, Fantasy books were shelved separate from SF and the library, as it still does, shelved fiction alphabetically by author. I had no clue there was such a thing as fantasy. No one talked about it, really. Remember, this was before the internet went big time and there were no websites, no Jimbo's no IO9, nothing. You learned about things through word of mouth and/or accidental exposure.

True story time: Once, when I was a wee little Jimbo attending Anchor Bay Elementary School (I think. I went to four different elementary schools.) we had a movie day and they played an animated movie named The Hobbit. No, not the Peter Jackson hackjob that took place a decade or so ago, a honest to goodness cartoon. I watched it, and I walked around singing this song for the next six months at least: 

Here's the thing though: At no point did I associate the movie with a genre or even a book. It wasn't until I hit high school and went for a stroll through the stacks looking from something readable (because the crap they give us in class wasn't, at least no voluntarily) and I came across a copy of the book that I knew it existed. Even then, it took the little star on the front with the words "Now an animated feature film." or something written on the front to assure me that I had the right book.

So I read the thing. It was *GASP* better than the movie. I went back to the library and asked the librarian, whose name I have forgotten because I suck, if she had anything else written by the same author. 

She looked like I had slapped her. "Haven't you read the Lord of the Rings?"

"The what?"

For the first of at least two times in my life, I was led by hand to the book I needed on the shelf and handed all three books. She said "I know you. Take all three. That way I won't see you for a few days."

So I did. And, like a lot of other nerds I was known to carry a novel around with me in case class got boring. My buddy Jeff saw me reading one of them one day (No, I don't remember which one. It's been over thirty years. Your bad.) and asked if I liked fantasy. My response was, "Like what?" And then he asked me if I like stuff like LoTR. Of course I did. That's why I was reading it. So he handed me a copy of Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. It was the first book in the Dragonlance Chronicles. Somewhere in there I went from liking to loving. Probably about the time THOSE DIRTY STURM KILLERS KILLED STURM. Don't worry. I'll get over it.Probably. I mean maybe. 

I think that must be when I realized that I had meant it when I said I had to be a writer. It's something I had wanted before but in the way every kid talks about what they want to be when the grew up.

You see, that death messed with me on a couple of levels. I was about a year away from losing the first person I was close to and Sturm's death hit me almost like the death of someone I actually knew. but there was something else: I had labeled those books "Sooooo predictable." because it was obvious that the good guys were going to win, and they did, and that Sturm would be the big hero and lead the parade in front of the Knights of Solamnia and gain all the laurels...

And now he was dead. They had written in wrong. I think I was probably as offended as I was dismayed. And listen folks, there has never been anyone in the world who was as convinced as I was that I had the story right. I had to write something that made sense.

Of course, I finished writing that in a bit two hours and it was no where near as long involved or well written as what the actual people who really got paid to write the story. Go figure. It's almost like I, with the hubris of a know it all teenager, wasn't as good at it as someone who actually knew what they were doing. Of course, that's thirty-plus years of hindsight later. At the time, I was wrong, they were right and the fact that they had written what would still be my favorite fantasy trilogy all these years later had nothing to do with anything.

I guess my point here is this: We need to make sure we're showing these things to those who come after us if we want to preserve our hobby. It's easier now than I ever dreamed of it being when I was a kid, too. Seriously, they make comic book movies now. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a powerful tool of geek creation if used correctly. Kindle Unlimited makes the literary side of things easier as well. Of course, all of those Wars and Trek movies are still out there and they're making more now! I haven't seen this much new Trek  available ever! It's an exciting time. 

And none of that covers my love of gaming, but that's a different story for a different day. That's a pretty awesome part of geekdom as well. 

Seriously folks, kids, grandkids, your friend at work who isn't into the Kardashians and needs some real entertainment, they need this kind of thing. It's weird that geeky things are popular now, but it's good. Our hobby has always been the place where the people who didn't fit, fit. We need to keep it alive for future generations of misfits. Geekdom won't be popular forever. Those kids are going to need somewhere to retreat to and we need to make sure we've saved that space.