Nature is, above all, profligate. Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital.…
Go here to look at the rest of the photos of the construction in progress. There are lots. I just wanna know if it’ll fly. And if you like that, you’ll totally love this:
Read more Someone is building a full-scale Millenium Falcon.
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 11 Things I won’t forget The schizophrenic nature of an equatorial sunrise. Sometimes it’s a bare, self-effacing minimum of pink pastels, peeping over the edge of the world with a diffident look, as if to say, “Oh, don’t mind me, I’ll just come up over here and you go…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 8/23/2010]
Patrick at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego is my connection for good fantasy and good science fiction. (He posts reviews here.) This year he got me hooked on military sf, space operas, the kind of novels that span light years as well as decades, where fates of galactic empires hang in the balance and it all comes down to the decisions of one man or woman in the captain's chair of a space carrier facing impossible odds. The battles rage up and down solar systems and in and out of hyperspace and even if you're a card-carrying pacifiist you can't help but thrill to the might and majesty of it all.
In Jack Campbell's
Lost Fleet series beginning with Dauntless, a war has been raging between the Syndic and the Alliance for more than a century, and in a perfidious bit of treachery the Syndic has killed the Alliance fleet's combat officers. Ah, but then the Alliance rescues Captain Black Jack Geary from the cryopod he's been adrift in ever since the last battle he fought a hundred years before. Since, after they wake him up, he's the most senior officer in the fleet, he takes command, and over six novels leads the lost Alliance fleet home.
John Scalzi's Old Man's War is the direct descendant of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. At age 75 John Perry leaves earth to join the Colonial Defense Force. In return for a new young body, one specially upgraded for battle, John and his peers will fight the alien races who are in competition with the CDF for new planets to colonize. John's got a smart mouth and a grunt's-eye view and he is very good company through a plot that just keeps throwing new stuff at you, and then throws some more. A must read.
Right now I'm tearing through David Weber's Honor Harrington series like a dreadnought through n-space. Think Horatio Hornblower with Pip for a pet. In On Basilisk Station, the first of this now 12-novel series, Captain Honor Harrington, Royal Manticore Navy, and her ship Fearless are assigned to picket the galactic transfer port Basilisk. Smart, principled, courageous, the aptly-named Honor cleans up the mess left behind by the last captain, including but not limited to a planetary insurrection and an enemy invasion. The characters are great, the plots brobdingnagian, but the detail of the setting is these novels' greatest strength. You feel like you're one of Honor's crew and you will both cheer and cower during the battle scenes.
Addendum on June 24, 2013:
And THEN I discovered Tanya Huff's Valor series all by myself. Confederation Space Marine Master Sergeant Torin Kerr battles her way across the galaxy, in spite of a novel-to-novel realization that the war the Confederation is fighting is not anything like it seems. I won't spoil it, but these books, five so far and I hope there will be more, are funny, smart, and real enough to smell the powder. You get the feeling that real marines talk and act and fight just like this (okay, absent the aliens), and the books might just give you the warm fuzzies that people like Torin stand between us and threat every day.
# Permanent link to Military SF
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 10 I just got my mess bill from FS1 Kelly Napier. The total comes to $290.25 for March, April, & May. “Was it worth it?” she wants to know. “Not exactly cruise ship quality?” Kelly breaks my mess bill down this way. “Breakfast is $1.65. Lunch & Supper are…
I could find my way home with that. You know. If I had wings. More birdhouse images here. More of artist Shuchun Hsiao designs here.
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 8 It’s called, in Coastie speak, a COMREL, short for community relations. Forty-five Munro crew members leave the ship at ten a.m. and present ourselves at a local orphanage for duty. We enter through a locked gate and are led to a courtyard occupying the center of a group…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2/1/2010]
Today some recommendations for great reads in Alaska history--
Did you know the last shot fired in the Civil War was fired in the Aleutians? You would if you’d read Confederate Raider by Murray Morgan, a book about the Confederate raiding ship Shenandoah, built and commissioned to disrupt if not destroy the Union’s whaling industry in the North Pacific. Built in England, armed in the Madeira Islands, the Shenandoah travels around the Cape of Good Hope and starts sinking Yankee whaling ships from the south Atlantic on. But unbeknownst to them, the war ended in the middle of their search and destroy cruise. When they discover this they are afraid to surrender to a Union ship for fear they will be sunk out of hand, so succesful has been their mission, so in an extraordinary feat of seamanship they sail south, dodging irritated Union vessels all the way, round Cape Horn and surrender to the British back in the UK, without suffering a scratch. One of the great sea stories.
If you’re interested in the Gold Rush there is no better book on the topic than Pierre Berton's The Klondike Fever, but I also love Good-time Girls by Lael Morgan. This history of the women who came north with the stampeders to mine the minors in saloons, dancehalls and hookshops from Dawson to Nome to Cordova is filled with anecdotes of those days when an attractive woman was literally worth her weight in gold. French Marie, the Oregon Mare, Black Mary, Klondike Kate and more, Lael’s affection and respect for these women, whom she regards as pioneers, rises up from every page of this book. And wait till you find out who the Sterling Highway was named for.
The Thousand-Mile War by Brian Garfield is a page-turner set in the Aleutians during World War II. Six months after Pearl Harbor the Japanese took the islands of Attu and Kiska, catching the United States by surprise for the second time in six months and putting Alaska and the west coast seriously at risk from invasion. America scrambled to respond, and for fifteen months the two nations slugged it out in ice and snow and fog. In the end, the Aleutian Campaign tied up a sixth of the Imperial Japanese Air Force and 41,000 ground troops, forces which McArthur and Halsey did not have to fight further south. Complete with maps, illustrations and notes.
# Permanent link to Great Reads in Alaska History
Many Battles by Ernest Gruening is a personal narrative written by one of Alaska’s territorial governors and later a US Senator, one of two to vote against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. A practicing politician, Gruening still has less of a personal ax to grind than most, and he’s a good writer. His eyewitness account of Elizabeth Peratrovich’s speech before the territorial legislature in 1948 on the subject of Native suffrage will give you goose bumps.
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 7 Relieving the Watch LTJG Josh Dipietro “Why’s this engine overloaded? What the hell you been doing all watch?” “Overload, what the hell are you talking about, look at the rack reading, look at the scav air. We are acting perfectly within published parameters, the only thing wrong here…
