Final - Preface

The Doctor, Zoe, Phee, and Officer Sonia Paley have just escaped the Mnemosyne, one of saturn's moons rich with a substance called bernalium. A space colony has been constructed around the moon to facilitate mining this ore, but what no one knew is that eons before, a civilization saw signs of disaster, and bundled up all that was necessary to preserve or restore their race into a machine called The Arkive. They sent it off as their world burned, and it crashed into the moon, too damaged to fulfill its purpose. It cast an allohistorical lure to the Earth, beckoning humans to one day venture out to the moon and (however indirectly) provide her the technology to build a way to go home. 

Of course, this story wouldn't be complete without the single-minded radical business type, Florian Hart, in this case. The manager of the mine, she merely sees all this as a liability, with no regard to the value of cultural preservation. Enter The Doctor and his companions Jamie and Zoe, who arrive when their ship detects the anomalies. My project is a  narrative of what went through The Doctor's head on the penultimate trip back from the moon.

Final - Protagonist Narrative

Having made sure that Zoe, Phee and the others were stable, I could finally breathe and sigh of relief. Once we  were back to the safety of the wheel I could put the next step of my plan into action. Now that we had sorted out what the Arkive really was, an ark of knowledge, we could decide what the best to deal with it would be.

“Resilience” I had heard through First, “remembrance restoration”. I could only hope that Arkive, after having failed two of the three, wouldn’t decide that the best course of remembrance was not slaughtering every human on the Wheel.

“A made thing”, First had called the Arkive. Something manufactured by such intelligence would have some kind of morality. Unlike Florian Heart, I groaned inwardly, as my thoughts turned to the volatile and corrupt Forewoman. Florian seemed more than willing to sacrifice her employees to remove the threat of Arkive and the blue dolls.

Florian, who seemed to be more than comfortable with sacrificing her employees to rid the lunar mines of Arkive, the blue dolls and soldiers; all mere obstacles to her goal of building wealth from harvesting the bernaliun within. The woman seemed like the type willing to blow up a moon to achieve her purpose. I mentally logged this away as a very real possibility, and pondered our next confrontation. I would give her one more warning before descending back to Arkive's chamber for the last step in my plan.

“Zoe,” I turned to my companion, “do you think you could adapt the sensors on the wheel to register the movement of the neutrinos that Arkive is spewing out? I'll have my hands full with explaining things to Jo and Sonia.”

“I believe so,” she said, “ but would we be able to detect them through hundreds of feet of moon?”

“The boys can been given low power blasters to make a sort of liquid amplifier in the ice of the moon. It should make for a fine neutrino detector.” Not to mention a trap if Florian's desire to be a success continues to blind her, I thought, but I kept that one to myself.

The shuttle was nearly back at the Wheel. Back there, I'd be able to get a further poke around the Blue Doll we'd autopsied earlier. Yes, it appeared to be synthetic, but I wanted to take a closer look at its cognitive functions so that I'd know if I'd need to be humane if it turned into a fight.

It wasn't fair for the Blue Dolls and Soldiers to have to be caught up in all this. They were made things, as they thought of themselves; made in turn by a made thing. Hopefully my last encounter in which Arkive told me her story of ruin through the Blue Doll had placated her and shown that at least my crew and I meant it no harm.

Sonia touched my shoulder. “We're here, crew. Let's go see how Jo is getting along.”

Yes, I thought, now comes the explaining. Jo must understand that all I do between dealing with Florian and the Arkive, I do with the best intentions of her citizens. Peace, resolution, and repair of the relative continuum displacement zone, probably not without cost.

“Fantastic,” I grumbled as I stepped off the shuttle, “I’m beginning to sound like the bloody machines.”

Reflection 7

Memoirs and nonfiction

Memoirs, autobiographies and fiction have fine lines  between them. The author that had so much drama over his book would not have been in the trouble he was in if he had published it as fiction. He wanted to changed the type of book to a nonfiction memoir to pick up the sales of his book.

I think his first mistake was changing the facts, lying, embellishing, whatever we want to call it. After that he was just being a people-pleaser; he changed facts and labels to make his book more appealing. Isn't that what we do with reports and essays though? If all high schoolers typed the way that words first occured to them, some grades may look pretty bleak. The difference is that he should have at least had a small print disclaimer of a statement that said something along the lines of "Hey, some of these details were changed to please you. I'm sorry you're welcome."

FInally, I think that most of the blowing-up came from Oprah, not the audience of the book. She seemed mostly concerned with how endorsing a book that turned out to not be totally factual made her look bad. Hasn't she had fictional books on her list before though? Authors of the future; please take this as a lesson in the importance of covering yourself.

Heroes and Villains (no Beach Boys references, please)

Which literary heroes or villains were the most glaring omissions from the lists in class?
-Spoiler warning-

-Arthur Dent
   This gentleman is alarmingly simple and hapless for the situations he's thrust into. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, his home planet is destroyed and he gets dragged along on a quest to find an ancient civilization of planet manufacturers and uncover the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, all the while grumbling about how no one in the universe seems to be able to make a decent cup of tea.

-Skagra
   The villain in Shada, by Douglas Adams. An ego maniacal Drornidian  that tried to realease a Time Lord called Salyavin and kidnapped a gaggle of other scientists to basically replace every mind in the universe with a copy of his. Most people that think that God might not exist react with relief or despair. Only Skagra responded by thinking "Wait a second, that means there's a situation vacant."

Claudius
   -A crafty Shakespearean villain. He murders his brother and marries his sister in law to become king of Denmark. His only remaining obstacle is main character and tragic hero, Hamlet, who also happens to be his nephewson. Spoilers; he dies at the end.

Scar
   -The Claudius of the Disney Kingdom. The parallels between Scar and Claudius were too many to go without giving him an honorable mention. In addition to the treachery he gets up to with taking over the pride lands, he also manages to turn a pack of goofy hyenas into the Third Reich with one song.

Angel

   -If the shark from Jaws gets a mention, then the Mama Megalodon (huge shark(really huge(like, it's ridiculous))) in the MEG series by Steve Alten deserves to be here too. Angel wreaked a heckuva lot more havoc than Jaws, and she had a much greater finale; defending the son of the man who discovered her from mososaurs and liopleurodons. 

Reflection 9

Great Moments from book 3

-There's some serious tension when Phee uncovers the Doll that Sam brought home for their little sister. I think the Dolls are  manifested reflections, forms taken on by whatever's mucking about Saturn's moons. There's also a bit where phee goes to pick up said Doll and it smiles. With some nasty teeth.

-There's an epic save when Jamie Mcrimmon dashes across the ice moon and uses the low gravity to vault over a crater to save Phee from the geysers. You'd think that it would lose its effect because it's a lot of text for the short amount of time that it describes, but the language used to describe it pulls it off quite well. You should read it.

-The last great moment I'll list here is when The Doctor, Zoe, and Luis find the half-doll half-human body in the wreckage of the tractor explosion. There's really good detail with the body, how the blue flesh is composed, as well as some good Holmsian logic.

Book 2, Review 1 (from way back then)

Upon losing my original book 2, Anthem(a story of individuality in a dystopian future) I've landed on a book called Tempest, which promises to be a cool time-travel-action-romance, sounds like a mash-up of The Time Traveler's Wife and Jumper. I also see there's family tension, the main character has probably lost people near and dear to him. Hopefully I haven't made a misstep as I start this new book. It looks like it'll be a good time.

Book Gate

A book gate, I guess curtains were too mainstream..