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Science Future: Searching Space

Science fiction inspires the world around us. It inspires our future. To discover these influences, we look to the future of science, to Science Future. The Science Future series presents the bleeding edge of scientific discovery and links it back to science fiction in order to discuss these influences and speculate on the future of science fiction.

Searching Space

NASA (CC BY 2.0)Space. The future will grant us access to what is beyond that big blue sky we see surrounding that bright thing that hounds us out of bed every morning. Space and science fiction have become so intertwined that even the mention of it will sometimes push a fantasy novel into the science fiction genre. Science fiction even has sub-genres specifically devoted to space based stories: Space Opera and Space Westerns.

We, as a race, are still taking our first steps into space; sending people out into space and peering out into the sky. We know there is a universe out there full of stars, planets, nebulae, and maybe even something called dark mater or dark energy but really, those are all just names. Our actual knowledge about those celestial objects is still very small and the only way we’re going to really find out is to send something out there to get a really good look at it.

The bad news is, it may be getting harder to go out there to see them. The common theory, up until two years ago, was that the universe was expanding but that the expansion was slowing. That there was a big bang and everything was moving away from that bang but, eventually, the universe would slow, stop, and then begin to collapse in on itself, perhaps leading to another big bang. That has all been thrown into confusion thanks to two independent teams of researchers who measured the distances of nearby galaxies using the light from Cepheids and supernoevae. They determined that the universe is currently expanding at about the rate of the width of the United States of America per minute, which compared to our last accurate calculation is actually faster. The expansion of the universe isn’t slowing, it is speeding up.

NASA (CC BY-NC 2.0)That means if we, as a species, are going to go out there, we’re going to need to hit some pretty fast-moving targets but before we do that, we need to figure out where those targets are. That’s where the Kepler Spacecraft comes into play. The Kepler Spacecraft, named after the famous 17th Century astrologer Johannes Kepler, was shot into space two years ago with a simple mission, start surveying worlds and figure out how many possible habitable planets might be out there. Kepler has been sending back data and, based upon the first four months of Kepler’s searching, there appears to be about 2 billion “Earth Analog” planets out there. Earth Analogs are planted that are roughly similar to earth in size and position within their own part of the universe, giving them some of the best chances of holding life similar to our own. Sadly this is considerably less than what researchers were predicting but those same researchers are still hopeful because Kepler hasn’t completed its survey yet, which means more data to devour!

Hot White Dwarf Shines in Young Star Cluster NGC 1818 (Public Domain via Hubble)And there is plenty of data out there to find. A professor at University of Washington has proposed using ground and space based telescopes to search near white dwarf stars for habitable planets. White dwarf stars are small, dense, cool stars, in the final stage of their life and these aspects might make it easier to spot planets near them. Their relatively low brightness might allow ground telescopes to identify a planet moving between the dwarf star and our telescopes with more ease when compared to brighter stars like our Sol. Another theory put forth is that these cool stars will provide exactly the right heat to a close orbiting planet to allow the planet to have liquid water, which scientists feel provide a huge indication of the possibility of extraterrestrial life. There are about 20,000 “nearby” white dwarf stars that could be observed from ground telescopes quickly and efficiently. So plenty out there for us to look at.

Our first steps into space are slow and shaky but with each day, each probe, and each theory, we are learning more and more about the universe waiting for us. It may not be full of Klingons, Vorlons, or Sith, but with 2 billion possibly habitable planets  out there, stories about what new and interesting beings we will find among the stars will never be in short supply.

Book Review: “Embassytown” by China Mieville

I was once working in a building that was under construction, and the noise was so loud and annoying that I said it was like someone playing a trombone — badly — inside a swimming pool filled with gravel. I made a simile, because the English language is capable of comparing things to other things that might not exist.

Imagine you couldn’t do that. Imagine that, to make said comparison, I would have to have a bad trombone player buried in a huge pile of gravel on the floor of a swimming pool, playing his instrument all the while.

The main character of China Mieville’s newest novel, Embassytown, is that trombone player.

Embassytown takes place in the far future, on a planet called Arieka. The natives — colloquially called Hosts — can breathe human-compatible atmosphere (although the reverse is not true), so they created an area on the planet for humans to settle in, so we could trade with them.

The world of Embassytown is exactly as phantasmagoric as you would expect from Mieville. Hyperspace travel goes through a weird realm called the immer where people see… things. The Hosts are a cross between spiders, flies, and two-mouthed hydras. Humanity has created Ambassadors to speak with the Hosts — twin humans, connected by mental implants — who act as one person (despite being two discrete beings) and can speak Language, the Hosts’ form of speech, which is delivered via two separate streams of words at the same time. And, of course, since the Hosts can’t compare things that never existed, in order to create similes they have to use humans.

Enter Avice, the main character, who — in Language — is “the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was given to her”. To create that simile, Avice actually had to undergo the events of it. So did dozens of other humans, such as “the man who swims every week” and others like him.

Embassytown follows Avice, who grew up in Embassytown and left home to become an immerser — someone who can pilot starships through the immer — but has returned to Arieka a minor hero, not just because of her facility with immersion but also because she is one of the most popular similes among the Ariekei. Spurred on by her (non-exclusive) husband’s desire to learn Language, Avice inveigles herself in high society, eventually forming a relationship with Ambassador CalVin and appearing with them at parties and functions. But one day, when a ship from Bremen (home planet of the confederation of worlds that includes Arieka) delivers a new Ambassador, EzRa, the strange world of Embassytown and the Ariekei who frequent it is changed forever.

Like all of Mieville’s books, Embassytown is full of rich imagery, unique patois, characters you both love and hate, and strange and wonderful creatures. In this book, the mind that gave us New Crobuzon’s Remade presents the Ariekei’s technology — all bioengineered, all alive, from aeoli (breathing masks that convert Arieka’s air into something humans can breathe) to guns that spit their ammunition in the direction they’re pointed. Even buildings are alive, to a point.

But Embassytown‘s Big Idea is language: what is it, how is it spoken, and how does it differ when you can’t even create a metaphor because your brain would literally force you to go insane? The Ariekei can’t lie because Language is a completely referential language. They don’t even have the word “that”, because when you say “that chair”, you not only refer to the chair at which you’re pointing but also implicity every other chair in existence as being “not the one I want you to focus upon”.

Despite its broad scope — language, politics, aliens, bioengineering — the novel echoes a common theme in Mieville’s other books: the love of one’s home and the desire to protect it. From Uther Doul and the Lovers in The Scar to Inspector Borlu in The City and the City, Mieville often focuses on a character who cares so much about his or her home city that s/he is willing to do anything to save it — go against the government, oppress the people, break the law, betray loved ones, and even commit murder. And, really, that sentiment is very deeply felt by many who have moved away from the place they consider “home” — for example, I still refer to Fort Lauderdale as “home”, even though I live in Atlanta now, and my memories of “home” are pretty much uniformly good, even though stuff happened to me while I lived there that I certainly wouldn’t want to experience again. Similarly, while Avice didn’t have a charmed childhood, and while she does harbor some animosity toward Embassytown, she clearly loves the place and doesn’t want to see anything bad happen to it.

And, since she’s a little bitchy through the first quarter of the book, that sort of thing really does help.

Unlike Kraken, Embassytown doesn’t force the reader to perform mental gymnastics to keep up with Mieville’s use of language. However, the book did take me quite a while to get through. There’s a lot to absorb, and a lot of pages to do it in, and, quite honestly, for the first half or so I really wondered what the dramatic tension was going to be. If the book has a failing, that’s it — that I had absolutely no idea where the road would take me, but damn if the scenery wasn’t worth staring at, slack-jawed and awed.

Embassytown is a great book. You should read it. It’s another home run by an author who seems to hit nothing but. But, you know, if you’d rather become part of a simile and be referred to as “the person who chose not to read the novel called Embassytown“… that’s up to you.

Note to Parents: This book contains violence (including self-mutilation), adult language, adult situations, and occasional sexual situations (many not of the male/female two-person variety). It should be safe for older teens who have read similar material in the past. However, the reading level of the material may preclude even mature younger teens from fully appreciating the novel. Of course, you should use your own best judgment where your children are concerned.

Science Future: Portable Power

Science fiction inspires the world around us. It inspires our future. To discover these influences, we look to the future of science, to Science Future. The Science Future series presents the bleeding edge of scientific discovery and links it back to science fiction in order to discuss these influences and speculate on the future of science fiction.

Portable Power

Mobile and ubiquitous computing is one of the hot spots of commercial research and it has been slowly invading our science fiction for years. Almost every one can refer to at least one person, if not themselves, who carries the internet around in their pocket and nearly every space faring race seems to have easy access to huge databases of information just by saying or thinking the word “Computer”.  Today, most lunch-break trivia arguments can be settled, if not very quickly, before the bill has arrived. That is until the battery runs out. Even to the most casual user of digital devices, occasionally having to disconnect ourselves from our external memory and constant updates, to let our little glowing boxes recharge, causes anguish.

Batteries by Tomblois (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)What would help alleviate this pain and suffering? Maybe if it didn’t take so long to recharge a battery. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found a way to use nanomaterials to recreate battery cathodes at a nano-scale that can charge up to 100 times faster than current commercial batteries but still power your netbook just fine. It helps explain why we never really see our protagonists pulling out their hyperspace coms and cursing that they forgot to leave it on the charger over night.

You still need to get power from somewhere, however, and some scientists at MIT have delved into biotechnology and developed an artificial leaf that will absorb a gallon of water and bright sunlight and produce enough electricity to power a house in a developing country for an entire day. The leaf works by simulating a form of photosynthesis, where in it breaks down water into hydrogen and oxygen and then uses those two elements to produce electricity. Imagine spaceships sailing through the solar system covered in artificial leaves that not only power our ships but also camouflage them in case they fly through a space forest.

If you’re not big into the flora fashion, Doctors at GeorgeTech have created one of the first commercially viable nanogenerators. That is to say they’ve created a flexible chip about the a quarter of the size of a stamp that generates electricity through simple movement. It does this by taking advantage of a nanowire property known as piezoelectric, or the ability to generate electrical fields when mechanically strained. Research suggests that five of these chips can output the same amount of power as a AA battery. Combined with the batteries above, this means that joggers and outdoor enthusiasts never have to worry about being disconnected from the internet ever again! Not a lot science fiction authors saw that one coming.
Bzzt

So does this mean that the lack of plugs, chargers, and batteries in our science fiction has been author oversight or author foresight? Science fiction likes it technological gadgets from laser rifles to portable shield generators to omni-tools but rarely do we see a person of the future angry over forgetting to charge their light sword. Ubiquitous energy seems to be the theme of the future and it’s fiction. But the issue of power has many reprocussions. Science is bringing us a future of full of miniaturized safe energy to help power our increasingly mobile lifestyles in a decreasingly large world. This might lead to stories that focus on the dehumanization, re-humanization, or even digitalization of human society. Either way power will always be an important part of science fiction even if most of science fiction chooses to ignore it.

Book Review: “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms” by N.K. Jemisin

Every now and then, you hear about a book by an author you’ve heard of. The book has a great title, gets good reviews, and is generally well-received. You see it on Amazon, but the price is a little higher than you’re willing to pay. So you decide to wait until it goes on sale.

Then it goes on sale. You buy it. You start reading it. And you wish you’d just kept on waiting.

That was my experience with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin.

Kingdoms takes place on an alternate Earth, where… well… 100,000 kingdoms are led by the Arameri family, who lives within a Space-Needle-like palace called Sky. The current leader of the Arameri, Dekarta, is getting on in years and wants to pass the mantle of leadership to one of his full-blooded Arameri heirs, Scimina and Relad.

But there’s a third Arameri heir, Yeine, warrior-princess of the far-off land of Darr — and the main character of Kingdoms. Brought to Sky by Dekarta, her grandfather, she finds herself embroiled in a power struggle for the leadership of the Arameri — and the entire world — as she becomes increasingly aware of exactly why she was ordered to Sky in the first place: the Arameri want her to die.

I think my main problems with Kingdoms stemmed from the tropes used and the storytelling style. The tropes included:

  • Young woman comes to town and is suddenly the most important person there.
  • Supernatural creatures try to recruit young woman to their side.
  • Young woman turns out to have some sort of connection to the supernatural creatures.

In this case, the creatures in question are the gods of the planet — Itempas, Nahadoth, and Enefa, roughly corresponding to God, Satan, and Eve/Lilith. Nahadoth lives among the Arameri; Itempas appears when the Arameri passes leadership on to the next heir. Unlike the real world, these gods actually provably exist, and can do godlike things. There are others, including the childlike Sieh, but it’s really all about Nahadoth.

Once Yeine gets situated in Sky, the story turns into a fantastical soap opera, with plots and counterplots, and in the middle of it all a single character who things just seem to happen to. Yeine does act upon her environment, but usually not until the environment has acted upon her.

To go back to my comment on storytelling style — the best way to explain it is that I felt like I was reading Anita Blake: God Hunter. The same problems I have with Laurell K. Hamilton’s storytelling, I had with Kingdoms (although this book was well-edited, whereas some of Hamilton’s novels unfortunately contain grammatical errors and spelling inconsistencies). I also didn’t really care for the digressions into Yeine’s dreams about what the gods were doing, or had done. They didn’t hold my interest.

There is an unexpected twist at the end — I’ll give it that — but unfortunately I felt as though the amount of talking and exposition that came right after, to support the twist, lessened its effect.

Despite my problems with the tropes and the style, I did find the main characters to be well-rounded and interesting. Even though I didn’t really like Yeine, I was on her side throughout the whole story. In the afterword of the digital copy of the novel that I read, an interview with the author indicated that Yeine was a version of herself taken “to the extreme”. I’ve never met or spoken to the author, but I’ve written enough stories with “a version of myself” as the main character that I saw the hallmarks of it, and they drew me out of the story a little. But despite that, I still wanted her, maybe if not to win, then to at least not lose. Some of the villains felt a little flat — and one of the characters who betrays our heroes, I don’t think I really had enough clues to appreciate the level of betrayal — but I was pleased with the sheer level of detail and attention paid to the main players. Especially Nahadoth and T’vril. I found T’vril to be the most relatable character in the story, and Nahadoth the most interesting. In fact, Nahadoth is really the character I think most people will be rooting for — bound by the Arameri, he nonetheless finds ways to rebel. I watched Watchmen last night, and I found myself drawing parallels to Dr. Manhattan’s immense power and his battle to control it for the people he cared about.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is the first book in the “Inheritance” trilogy, according to the cover. I’m not sure I’m going to read the second book anytime soon, but I think the first one was well-received enough that the sequels will be enjoyed by those who liked Kingdoms. Unfortunately, I didn’t really care for the book that much. Despite the author’s clear talent and ability for worldbuilding and characterization, the story didn’t hold my interest — possibly because, at least in my mind, it didn’t bring anything new to an oft-told tale of a young warrior-trained woman upon whom rests the fate of the entire world.

Maybe next time.

Note to Parents: This novel contains violence and a couple of sexual situations, one explicit. Mature teens will be able to handle it; younger ones may become distracted by the imagery. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.

Book Review: “Scouts” by Nobilis Reed

Warp drive. Hyperspeed. Folding space. Immersion. The Infinite Improbability Drive. Read five different pieces of science fiction and you’re guaranteed to find five different propulsion methods with five different names. But one thing I can guarantee* is that you’ve never seen a starship being powered the way Nobilis Reed does it in Scouts.

WARNING: Scouts is a novel for adults, and as a result the review contains discussions of explicit sex. Reader discretion is advised.

(Continue Reading…)

Science Future

“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.” – J. G. Ballard

Science is not something the we think about day-to-day. As children we’re educated in the ways of biology, chemistry, and physics. We visited museums, planetariums, and wildlife parks. We calculated mass and velocity, dissected animals, and stared at the periodic table of elements with vague comprehension.

Then it all stopped.
Plasma lamp at Kobe Science Museum CCL 2.5 (http://opencage.info)
But there are many different ways to be exposed to science. One could go re-visit a museum, subscribe to a science news feed, pick up a nature magazine, or go grab a quick doctorate. There is, however, one avenue that is often overlooked even by its regular consumers. You could read, or in our case listen to, science fiction.

Science is the systematic study of the world around us. Science fiction is the exploration of science through the use of story and imagination. Every time we hear a new and amazing tale, we’re being exposed not to present day science but the science of the future. Science fiction takes what we know today and projects it forward, creating a hypothesis surrounded by an entertaining tale. These hypotheses have come to influence not only our popular entertainment but the minds of generations. People across the world now carry hand-held communication devices, once called communicators on a popular science fiction television show and now called cell phones. In Japan robots of all shapes and sizes are being fashioned after the popular stories of giant robots in their science fiction. All over we can see the small influences of science fiction in the science and technologies of our society.

So if we can see the influence of science fiction upon our world now, what science fiction has yet to be written that will inspire our future?

To know that we need to look to what is between science and science fiction. We need to look at Science Future. Science Future is a series of articles dedicated to bridging the gap between science and science fiction by looking at the bleeding edge of scientific discovery and linking it back to science fiction. Each article will present scientific discoveries and discuss science fiction themes related to it  and the possible impacts it could have upon the future of the genre. Together, we will explore science fiction from its roots.

“Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.” – Isaac Asimov

Closing for Submissions until August

Hey folks,

We’ll be closing to submissions next Monday (the 6th) until August as we clear some stories out of the inbox and cut down a bit on the inventory of stories we’ve already bought.

–Bill

Congratulations to the Nebula Awards Winners!

It’s Nebula Awards weekend, and the ceremony was last night. Congrats to the winners!

Short Story

Novelette

Novella

Novel

The Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

  • WINNER Inception, Christopher Nolan (director), Christopher Nolan (screenplay) (Warner)
  • Despicable Me, Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud (directors), Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul (screenplay), Sergio Pablos (story) (Illumination Entertainment)
  • Doctor Who: ‘‘Vincent and the Doctor’’, Richard Curtis (writer), Jonny Campbell (director)
  • How to Train Your Dragon, Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders (directors), William Davies, Dean DeBlois, & Chris Sanders (screenplay) (DreamWorks Animation)
  • Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Edgar Wright (director), Michael Bacall & Edgar Wright (screenplay) (Universal)
  • Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich (director), Michael Arndt (screenplay), John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, & Lee Unkrich (story) (Pixar/Disney)

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

Jeff VanderMeer Covers Finnish SF in Two Part Series

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer recently went to Finland to attend lectures and learn about the SFF community there. in a two-part blog series, Jeff talks about authors he met and the experience of interacting with SFF fandom in a country where the government actively supports the arts (including SFF!) communities.

Supported by that community, a number of unique Finnish writers are appearing on the scene—several of whom have been or will soon be translated into English. Two of the most prominent for readers in English this year are Johanna Sinisalo and Hannu Rajaniemi, both of whom, Halme notes, hail from small villages in northern Finland.

Birdbrain

Sinisalo, whose Birdbrain was published this April in the U.S., is a well-known figure in Finland, where she’s written teleplays, screenplays, and been involved in a stunning number of different creative projects. Including Birdbrain on my top 10 fantasy novels list for Locus Online, I wrote, “This slow-burn of a novel relates the story of Finns Jyrki and Heidi as they hike through the wilderness of Tasmania and New Zealand. Sinisalo immerses the reader in the physicality of the trek, and the increasing isolation of the hikers…the atmosphere created is exciting and the trip fascinating to watch play out. When the fantastical element finally enters the story it’s all the more effective because of the careful way in which Sinisalo has brought the reader to that point.”

Finnish Science Fiction and Fantasy: Johanna Sinisalo, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Moomins: Part One
Finnish SF and Fantasy: An Established Community, a Surge of Talent: Part Two

Book Review: “Blind Man’s Bluff” by Peter David

Warning: This review contains spoilers for previous New Frontier novels, most notably Treason.

Many a young Star Trek fan has imagined what it would be like to create a new ship and crew and take them on adventures around the galaxy. Many of those young fans make a start, and then give up when they realize that (a) carving out a chunk of a universe with established rules can be kind of difficult and (b) they’ll never sell their idea to CBS/Paramount/Simon & Schuster.

And then there’s novelist and comic-book author Peter David, who brought us Star Trek: New Frontier, carving out a chunk of a universe with established rules and selling the idea to his editors.

For fourteen years, David has been sharing with us the adventures of Captain Mackenzie Calhoun of the U.S.S. Excalibur — his unorthodox style, his unorthodox crew, his unorthodox worldview. In fact, if New Frontier had a single word to describe it, that word would be… well… unorthodox.

And in his latest New Frontier novel, Blind Man’s Bluff, he continues in the fast-paced adventure vein that his fans have come to enjoy.

To recap: in Treason, David’s previous New Frontier novel, the crew is introduced to a powerful new enemy, the D’myurj (sound it out) and their servants, the even-more-powerful armored soldiers who possess an Achilles heel in the form of a vent in said armor. They kill many people on Captain Mueller’s U.S.S. Trident, and generally wreak havoc on the galaxy, until Selar (first introduced in TNG’s “The Schizoid Man” as Dr. Crusher’s colleague) undergoes a Vulcan mental break known as “treason” and ends up destroying most — but not all — of the D’myurj in hopes of finding a way to save her son from what is essentially progeria. She succeeds, but the cost is her own life.

Blind Man’s Bluff picks up shortly after the events of Treason. It’s focused mostly on Calhoun, although there are notable appearances by the entire Excalibur crew, as well as some others. After paying a little lip service to the existence of Admiral Shelby, Captain Mueller, and those who died on the Trident, we find ourselves on Xenex, Calhoun’s home planet, where he is attempting to marshal his people into a guerilla force to fight off the Brethren. As the book continues, layers of the D’myurj/Brethren plot are peeled back and we find out exactly how Calhoun was marooned on Xenex and why he’s fighting in the first place.

The b-plot of the book is almost better-developed — and definitely easier to understand — than the a-plot. Morgan Primus, mother of Robin Lefler, became joined with the Excalibur’s computer system some books back. She is gaining power at a remarkable rate — rather like Barclay in “The Nth Degree” — and Calhoun realizes she’s becoming a danger not just to his ship but the entirety of Starfleet. Via Soleta, who you may remember now has her own spy ship, he enlists the help of Seven of Nine and The Doctor in a plot to get Morgan off his ship, once and for all.

As I said earlier, Blind Man’s Bluff is a fast-paced adventure story, which makes it a lot of fun to read. It also contracts its view somewhat, focusing only on the Excalibur (in recent novels, we’ve dealt with both the Excalibur and the Trident, as well as Space Station Bravo, and while David is perfectly capable of casting a wide net, it’s nice to get back to a smaller-scale story). He does bring back almost every character from the previous novels — at least, the ones who are alive (including Calhoun’s sons Xyon and Moke as well as Admirals Nechayev and Jellico) — but the story is really all about the main characters from the Excalibur. While Calhoun is off fighting on Xenex, his first officer Burgoyne and the rest of the gang — Calhoun, Tobias, Xyon (Burgy’s son, not Calhoun’s), and Mitchell must deal with Morgan.

While the novel did have its sticky points — the Nechayev plotline particularly confused me, and I really wasn’t expecting its resolution; also, it seemed as though too much time was spent on the crew of the Dauntless — David’s writing managed to keep me well and truly interested in everything that was going on. In addition, he hung a bit of a lampshade on his own writing style. In fact, there’s even a scene where Burgoyne laments the fact that everyone on Excalibur has their verbal responses set permanently on “sarcasm”. He does overplay Calhoun’s previously-stated tactical and combat skills to excess, perhaps to hang another lampshade, perhaps to help new readers understand just how powerful the Brethren actually are. Whichever it was, it really didn’t work for me. I guess it was necessary to make the hero more mortal, but he’s so immortal (thanks to the way he was written in the past) that there really wasn’t any other way.

David said in a recent interview that this might be the last New Frontier novel — his contract with the publisher is coming to a close and he hasn’t heard about any extensions or re-signings yet. It may be that he wanted to close the series with a bang, killing off another major Star Trek character — you may recall he also offed Admiral Janeway in Before Dishonor — but while I found the novel to be a good one, I wasn’t really satisfied by the ending. I feel like there’s a little more story to be told, and that a few loose ends remain to tie up. It’s not like a sequel hook; it’s like there’s a third book in a trilogy that’s waiting to be written. I hope it is.

In the foreword to Peter David’s Q-Squared, he says that some readers find his books quick reads, but this one will take longer because it’s more complicated. I finished it in one Saturday afternoon. Blind Man’s Bluff took about two-and-a-half hours, despite being 352 pages long. I’d say that fans of New Frontier, and even fans of Star Trek tie-ins, would enjoy this book. It’s not a book for new readers — especially given that there’s very few threads back to major characters in any series except Voyager — but despite my issues with it, it’s another stellar piece of Peter David Star Trek fiction, and I look forward to whatever comes next.

Note to Parents: This book contains occasional adult humor and an awful lot of violence. I don’t recall any sexual situations, although there is a scene of partial nudity. If your kids can handle Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, they’ll be able to handle this book, but if Khan’s mangled face gave them nightmares, you might want to skip this book for a while. Of course, you should use your own best judgment where your children are concerned.

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