Welcome To the Cedar Grove

 Relieved and frustrated both at the same time - does that emotion have a name?

I've mentioned before that I spend most of Thursday feeling on edge and anxious and basically looking forward to 8:30 or 9pm when 'it' will all be over and I can chill out with Star Trek: Discovery. Well, that's all well and good when the thing happens, but when it doesn't I feel stressed because of feeling stressed all day for no reason.

Worse still when you ask someone a question, and even though you know they're online and logged into the platform, they don't even 'see' the the message you send, and certainly don't answer it.

Anyway, Discovery was perhaps my favorite episode of season 2 so far... they need to write more like this, but oh, oh no, only 4 episodes left? Then what will I do!

 Exhausted, but it's a good kind of exhaustion... Spent the day moving and cleaning and packing and preparing to have the floor fixed in the bedroom. Loud music, doing, dusting, cleaning. Didn't really have a moment to stop because there wasn't time, and you know what? After it was all done, in spite of feeling exhausted and a little bit 'busted up' (aching and sore from all the work), I felt good! I felt proud of myself and happy. The only disappointment of the day came in not being able to watch ST:DSC until Sunday... but the sleep was a good thing!

What Price Honor by Dave Stern




From product information on Amazon:

The Starship Enterprise NX-01 is humanity's flagship -- the first vessel to begin a systematic exploration of what lies beyond the fringes of known space. Led by Captain Jonathan Archer, eighty of Starfleet's best and brightest set forth to pave humanity's way among the stars. Tempered by a year's worth of exploration, they are a disciplined, cohesive unit. But now one of their number has fallen.

Bad enough that Ensign Alana Hart is dead. Worse still that she died while attempting to sabotage the Enterprise -- and at the hands of Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, the ship's armory officer and her nominal superior. Even as questions swirl around Hart's death, Archer, Reed, and the rest of the Enterprise crew find themselves caught squarely in the middle of another tense situation- a brutal war of terror between two civilizations.

But in the Eris Alpha system, nothing -- and no one -- are what they seem. And before the secret behind Ensign Hart's demise is exposed, Reed will be forced to confront death one more time.

What can I say about this...? I enjoyed it, it was a reasonably good read, the characterisation, while not completely spot on was close enough, for the most part. Perhaps Reed was not quite as sharp as his own self, but I suppose this was a literary device to allow the readers to figure things out as they went along too. Predictable, perhaps, but the most annoying thing, the most irritating tendency on the part of the writers was to ram the 'important' facts down the readers throats by repeating them two or three times. Star Trek audiences are smart people... for the most part I have found this to be true, and the books do tend to 'write down' to them.

While focussed around Lt Reed and his affairs, the story was ensemble enough to feel a little like an additional episode of Enterprise, which was, I suppose, a refreshing thought. :) It could have been a little sharper, but on the whole, enjoyable enough.

"We're here now!" she protested, fighting a dry sob. "And... I feel we have so little... time."
"We have eternity, beloved."
"You may have eternity. I have only now." Conversation between Paul and Chani God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert

I have been asked many times, and I have no answer for why I love the Dune series so much. Is it that I associate myself somehow with Chani? I do not know why that would be so. Chani had her love from the beginning, almost from the moment she met Paul - indeed he knew before, prescient as he was. I on the other hand, as a little girl, dreamed of a love that was put beyond my reach by the arrangement made by my parents when I was but a child of eight. Or so I believed. Perhaps it is in the depth of the love I found in Shar and the others of our bondmates, restoring to me the dream of love that I could never have found with my First Medjai husband. Enough perhaps to say that I understand the yearning then.

Thinnest by far of the series, God Emperor highlights so well the conflict between duty and love, desire and duty, religion and politics that is at the heart of the series. Perhaps that too is where I indentify with these books so well, since I was also the 'victim' of a political union, for all that we grew to care for each other, that was the truth of my being given to Ardeth. The 'Good Medjai Woman' meant to be a charm for him against the 'evils' of anyone else that his heart might choose. Our Elders are such a foolish and short sighted cabal.

So, In God Emperor, Paul struggles against those who would cast him in the role of Messiah, when all he desires is to live the life of a man with the woman he loves. He fights a future his prescient vision has shown to him, knowing there is no escape... and he lives with the knowledge that the woman who gives him life, through that which she desires so badly, will come to end her life and give her waters back to the desert.

( On Meiri )

Chani... Fremen woman... concubine only, yet more than a wife. She longs to give her man the son and heir he needs if the Atreides line is to continue, yet nothing she can do will bring her to conceive the child she longs to bring to birth, for she is thwarted by the wife, who is less than concubine, who conspires against her husband with the enemies who wish for his distruction. In this I can also identify with Chani. A product of our upbringing perhaps, but we women of the desert are charged with bringing life, bringing the future to our husbands. When the healers told me, following the birth of Tareef and Luloah that, for me to bear another child would likely be a fatal decision for me... it is like, to me, being told that I should not breathe, or eat, or sleep. So too I believe Chani felt when she could not bring to Paul the child she longed to give to him.

( On the fulfilment of wishes )

So with the birth of Leto and Ghanima, and Chani's passing, comes the end of this thin installment, with Alia - St. Alia of the Knife - also called abomination by some due to her 'in the womb' awareness, serving as regent for the Leto after their father, blinded by his enemies, follows the Fremen custom of walking out into the desert to give himself to the great worm... and we must wait to discover what becomes of them all.

And so the book ends, and I must again wait my turn to read the next installment. No doubt I will find other things to speak of then.