Archive for the ‘Reviews of books’ Category
Star Trek: The Amazing Stories
{5/5} “It is not possible for me to be with you today to honor my father. I am far away on a mission to promote galactic peace. My mission honors my father’s memory. Sarek and I often did not agree. Everyone knows that. And yet… he is the reason I am where I am today.” […]
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds V
{5/5} “Within the confines of the library, the cadets were polished, serious, stiff. Outside, in the fresh air, amid the profusion of color, with the soft green grass beneath them, they were seedlings reaching for the sun. With their guards down and their minds open, they were flowers ready to blossom.” (from “Efflorescence”) Star Trek: […]
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within
{4.5/5} “Our species — no, forgive me, our cultures — aren’t the same at all. Quelin fear outsiders because we use them as scapegoats for the things we fear about ourselves. We bar cultural exchange because change frightens us. Whereas your people… You fear outsiders because they gave you no choice in the change they […]
Black Wine
{4.5/5} “I cannot keep thinking in the language of cruelty in which I was born… But here in the mountains they have names for the things I want to become: happy, secure, gentle, kind, good. I will will learn the subtle words, the nuances of meaning, and I will be able to think thoughts I […]
Memory Wire
{4.5/5} “I think they simply wanted to make us whole… to cure what they saw as our tragic failure. Failure of memory. Which is failure of conscience. They were surprised, I would guess, by our capacity for aggression. For ruthlessness, for inflicting pain. Conscience is memory… and the stones would restore it.” Memory Wire by […]
New Suns
{5/5} “A country that has reached the age of wisdom would stop building monuments to the warmongers of its history, but rather erect them for its peacemakers, those who saved lives by preventing the course of events from descending into a time of sword and fire.” (from “The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations”) New Suns: Original […]
Legacies
{4.5/5} “‘I want to stop feeling evil,’ Thovalt said. ‘That is our legacy, the taint of evil, of being part of a terrible, terrible wrong. We are all stained by it. You have built a little Burdania and try to pretend it is the world, and maybe most of you can, and if you can, […]
The Gaslight Dogs
{4.5/5} “‘Sometimes,’ Sjenn said, ‘the Dog must kill.’ It was the thing that had brought her here to this Kabliw world. It was the anger that had proven to be shallow soil in their conversation, anger that now seemed distant on the Land, unmarked even by the stones of memory. The captain now understood what […]
The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway
{4.5/5} “What I took mostly from these events was what I tried to tell Seven of Nine later, that a single act of compassion can transform us. Having met Tret Rekheny, however briefly, it was not so easy, in future, for me to think of all Cardassians as cruel, as murderous, as vicious. Some of […]
Red Moon
{4.5/5} “Spinning slowly around, trusting I can recover my balance if I lose it, or just get back up, I see the hills look odd too. Not tectonic action, nor rain, nor riverbeds, nor glaciers, nor wind shaped these hills. They are uncanny. You can see something is different here, and it’s hard not to […]