Latourette's A History of Christianity, Volume I

I picked up a copy of Kenneth Scott Latourette's A History of Christianity, Volume I: Beginnings to 1500 at a used bookstore a year or two ago, and its place has finally come up in my queue. I have to say it was quite a chore to read and extremely disappointing. There's a lot I don't like about the book, so I'm not sure where to begin. First, Latourette has such a pro-Christian bias that it is hard to separate out his judgments based on an objective analysis of the facts from his judgments based on his own personal religious beliefs. This is tied into a second major problem: there's no footnotes or other citations, which means that the reader has no idea whether any given assertion is well-grounded in historical fact or scholarship. Third, Latourette likes to make extremely broad generalizations and has no tolerance for conflicting evidence or interpretations of history. He accepts, uncritically, that everything in the four gospels are historical fact, has little interest in discussing why certain texts were canonized in what today we consider the Bible and others weren't, spends just a handful of pages on the Crusades, writes barely a single page on the Inquisitions, and makes a pathetic attempt to explain away Christian support of slavery as having offered "dignity" to the working man (p. 246). For what it's worth, I can say the book has a thorough (if boring) discussion of monasticism and the Eastern Orthodox Church. Still, suffice it to say, I have no interest in picking up Volume II.

Wild Space

Of the many Star Wars books I've read since I began directing a role-playing game set in that universe, the best one I've come across is the recently-published Wild Space by Karen Miller. Judging by the cover, I was expecting a limp, kids-oriented tie-in to the animated t.v. series with a heavy emphasis on the clones. Instead, I found an engrossing tale of how Senator Bail Organa and Obi-Wan Kenobi forge a unique bond during a mentally-grueling and physically-punishing mission to uncover a rumored planet possessing Sith artifacts. One of the most surprising things about this book is how little there is in the way of "action scenes"--there's hardly a blaster fired or a lightsaber ignited in the whole book. Yet, the dialogue, the personalities, and the plot are more than sufficient to keep the pages turning. If novels tied to the animated series continue to be of this quality, I might just manage to forgive the annoying continuity mess the show makes out of Anakin's having become a Jedi Knight just weeks after the battle of Geonosis.

Blood Engines

Every yuletide, I ask my sig-other to surprise me with some books I haven't asked for and know nothing about, in the hopes that I might thereby discover something cool to read that I normally would never stumble upon. One of the success stories of the most recent wintermark was Blood Engines by T.A. Pratt. The novel is in the urban fantasy genre, and starts off in the middle of the action as Marla, the sorceror-ruler of an industrial East Coast city has to travel to San Francisco in order to find the key to protecting herself from an emerging coup. I think what I like most about the book is that it doesn't embrace conventional moralism--the protagonist certainly isn't your standard goody-goody heroine and the plot has some nice twists and surprises. It also a nice sly sense of humor which always makes fantasy novels a little easier to swallow. I'm definitely planning on picking up the sequel.

Avengers: Terminatrix Objective

As I've mentioned in other posts, I'm not a big fan of time-travel stories because the inherent causal paradoxes make my fragile brain hurt (something that has made me less than enthusiastic about the current season of Lost). As you can imagine then, a time-travel centered miniseries like Avengers: The Terminatrix Objective (1993) is not really my cup of tea. The Marvel Universe has quite an elaborate mythos about a collection of time-manipulating warlords (known as the Council of Cross-Time Kangs or somesuch), each of whom rules an empire both "horizontally" (specific sectors or planets of the galaxy) and "vertically" (over say, the 14th through 16th centuries). Each warlord has all types of schemes and plans to extend their own empire. For whatever it's worth, I will confess this is an original and intriguing idea. Anyway, suffice it to say that in The Terminatrix Objective one of these warlords teleports three heroes to help her with some sort of task, causing one of the other warlords to teleport three different heroes to foil the plan, which causes the two groups of heroes to have the obligatory fight with each other before realizing they need to team up. This may all sound hopelessly vague and confusing, but then that's part of the reason I hate time-travel stories. Now I'm not even sure why I wrote this post. If I could go back in time and tell myself not to I would, but then I wouldn't have written the post to begin with and wouldn't have a reason to go back and tell myself not to do it which means I would still write it and well, nevermind . . .

Clone Wars Campaign: Recap # 9

Episode 2.2, "The Ominous Silence" Session 5

On Coruscant and the Core Worlds, it hardly seems like a war is going on. No citizens have been drafted, no cities have suffered invasion or orbital bombardment. The holonews vids bury brief mentions of the war that seems to be going on in another galaxy entirely.
But a handful of people--journalists, politicians, and others--have begun to ask questions. How did the Republic obtain an enormous fleet and millions of clone soldiers almost overnight? What will happen to the Clones when the war is over? Just how many of them are there?
But no answers are forthcoming, and those who ask fall silent or meet with unfortunate accidents, as Supreme Chancellor Palpatine reluctantly accepts the Senate's conferral of more emergency war powers . . .
In the remote Ansion system, however, a small group of Republic operatives know a piece of the puzzle: the Clone troopers are falling at staggering rates, stretched thin on hundreds of planets and desperately in need of bacta, the one healing agent their bodies' immune systems are partially rejecting.
The operatives can find the cure and save thousands of lives; or reveal the secret to the other side and earn millions of credits . . .

Marpa, Tarn, and I-5 return to the barracks and notice that Beta team hasn't returned. I-5 plays a message from Ycram aboard the Skyhook, stating that there has been yet another attack. Shortly after, they're summoned to a special meeting where Bel Sekand makes his first appearance and talks about the competition rules. Sekand tells everyone that Beta team won't be participating in the final competition, and that only two members of Delta squad will compete. Later that evening, I-5 explores whether he can pierce the low-intensity communications jamming field around the site and is chased by a strange, metallic spider-like creature. At midnight, everyone is summoned for departure to the final competition.

[73 AG]

After a long, bumpy ride in a landspeeder, the group arrives at the "Misty Maze" competition site. The contest involves navigating the maze, collecting two pieces of a device, assembling the pieces, and using them to access the final prize platform. Tarn, Marpa, and I-5 encounter a variety of obstacles in the maze, including B-2 battle droids, Nexu, and an ambush by the last member of Delta team. Eventually the group emerges victorious and claims their prizes: 250,000 credits and Arresta.

The foursome are returned to Cuipernam and then make their way back to the safehouse, where Trips is waiting for them. Unbeknownst to everyone, a dermal tracking device had been attached to Arresta, and Bel Sekand was happy to share the signal with the disgruntled competitors. Surrounded by the remnants of Delta and Beta, a firefight ensues inside and around the safehouse. Trips purges the computer banks of all data and sets charges for the safehouse to implode and then makes his escape. I-5 soon follows and returns to the Skyhook. With the help of blasters, stun grenades, and a high-speed landspeeder collision involving Tarn, all but one of the attackers is captured or killed.

The group then rendezvouses with Trips aboard the Broken Diamond, a heavily armed and modified Republic gunboat. They decide to fly to the Skyhook’s anchor facility to interrogate a captured terrorist. There they met Jandssen, the one-eyed chief of the facility and proceed to interrogate the prisoner. With the help of Jedi mind tricks, they learn that the prisoner was actually Deuce, a Clone Commando charged with infiltrating the raiders. He gives them coordinates and the cryptic message “they’re not what they pretend to be” before falling unconscious. The group leaves Deuce at the anchor facility and fly to a forested area a few kilometers from the coordinates so that a reconnaissance can be conducted on foot.

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My Buffy Novel (Part II)

In a previous post, I wrote about how I finished writing a Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel, only to discover that it needed to be twice as long as it was in order to meet the submission guidelines. Now, the rational thing would have been to leave well enough alone, but I hit upon the crazy idea of expanding the novel by having two linked storylines (one set with the characters as of Season 2, one set with the characters as of Season 7) told through alternating chapters. There's certainly been far more complex structures for novels, and I think it allowed me to draw some nice contrasts between how characters had changed over time, but for a Buffy novel it probably made for a pretty confusing story. Anyway, after writing the second dozen chapters, I finally had a complete novel. Finishing it was more of a relief than a joy--I frankly found the writing more of a chore than a pleasure. Still, as naive of the publishing world as I was, I sent it off to several agents (form letters) and then off to Simon & Schuster (no response).

What took me a long time to discover is that, even if the novel were any good, publishers of media tie-in novels (anything from Star Wars to Alias to Buffy) simply aren't going to take any chances on new authors. Media tie-in novels are almost exclusively written by authors who have already established themselves by writing and (having published) novels with their own original characters. The second thing which I probably should have pieced together is that by the time I finished my novel, Buffy as a pop culture phenomena had declined far below its circa Season 2-3 peak. Buffy novels were being published more and more rarely, and I chose a pretty bad time to jump on the band-wagon (of course, now would probably be the worst time, as I'm not even sure if the novel line is still active at all).

The story has a happy ending, however. During all those Sunday afternoons I was writing my novel, my then-sig other decided he might as well start writing a novel he had been thinking about since he was twelve years old. Although I found writing a grind, he loved the process and crafted a great indigenous fantasy story that ended up being published as the The Way of Thorn and Thunder trilogy.

Although Hell Frozen Over will never be published, I feel a sense of accomplishment in having finished the damn thing and I'm looking forward to re-reading it someday, after many years have passed, to see just what the hell I was thinking . . .

Free Exercise and the Nebraska Constitution

Thanks to Howard Friedman's excellent Religion Clause blog, I've learned that the Nebraska Supreme Court has finally resolved the legal question I discussed at length in my first major law review article (The Religion Provisions of the Nebraska Constitution: An Analysis and Litigation History) by ruling that the religious free exercise guarantee in the Nebraska Constitution should be interpreted identically with the Federal Constitution's Free Exercise Clause. It's not surprising, given that in previous cases the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that other guarantees in the state constitution were identical to that in the Federal Constitution, but it's a disappointing decision to advocates of strong religious freedom because the Federal guarantee is much weaker than the guarantee contained in many other state constitutions.

(http://religionclause.blogspot.com/2008/12/nebraska-high-court-rejects-free.html