octavia_cade's reviews
2611 reviews

In the author's note at the back of the book, DeCandido talks about how much he likes Q, and how much of a fun character he thinks that Q is. I agree with him. John de Lancie is extremely entertaining in the role and I'm always glad to see him pop up in episodes, because he always looks like he's having so much fun with it and therefore I have fun with it as well.

I didn't find this novel particularly fun, to be honest. Mostly I just found it kind of strained, as if it were trying a bit too hard to be meaningful in its attempt to shoehorn in every possible Q reference and weave them together into one over-arching - and not very interesting - story. The strain took all the fun out of it. 

This is an enormously detailed and densely argued history of the colonisation of New Zealand, as told from a Māori perspective. As such, it is very much a history of injustice, of exploitation and marginalisation and land grabs, but it is also, as the latter chapters of the book especially make clear, a history of resistance - and an increasingly successful resistance at that.

Walker is an academic and it shows - it took me a long time to slowly make my way through this, but it was well worth the effort. It's the last from a list of ten books from the Spinoff Anti-Racist Reading List for New Zealanders and, not gonna lie, it's taken me years to get through those ten books. They are admittedly challenging books, both on a moral level - the history of racism in this country is appalling, and one which privilege has often allowed me to ignore - and often on a technical level as well, as they frequently grapple with concepts and jargon which are unfamiliar to me (I had to do a lot of explanatory googling with Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies, for example, not knowing anything about anthropological methods). So, a long reading journey, but absolutely worthwhile. I feel as if I have come away from it with a better understanding of my own country, and the history of injustice that exists here - a history that still very much impacts on the present and the future. 

I liked the first in this series, but Seven for a Secret is much better. I think it helps that it's a novella, rather than a novel made out of novellas, if that makes any sense - it feels more cohesive, more stripped back, and I've always liked novellas anyway. Vampirism takes a backseat here to werewolves, and adolescent girls turning into werewolves, or their berserker equivalents, will never not entertain me. Ruth, especially, is an excellent character, and while readers never get to see her eventual assassination of the Prussian chancellor, I don't think that we need to. It's enough to know that she gets it done. 

As I said, I liked the first book, but this is the one I'd read again. 

Malaria isn't really a problem in New Zealand, as far as I know - although we do have mosquitoes, horrible things that they are - so I knew very little about the disease when I picked this book up at the library. It's a fascinating and well-researched account of how malaria has affected people over the course of human history, and how humans in turn have tried to affect both it and the mosquitoes that carry it.

I think what most struck me here is the importance of localisation. Not only is the disease itself easily adapted to local conditions, but any attempt to counter it must also take those conditions into account or risk abject failure. That sounds obvious, but it's clear from many of the anti-malarial attempts described in this book that that obvious, for many people, was not obvious at all. Just as compelling was the portrait of a disease that appears to be the ultimate survivor, mutating and adapting in a number of different ways - it begs the question: can malaria ever be eradicated in the same way that smallpox was, for instance? The book seems to suggest that no, it can't, which is a somewhat depressing thought, especially if the changing climate influences the spread of malaria-bearing mosquitoes to different, previously uninfected parts of the world. Ugh, what a prospect. 

Captain Pike spends this book cosplaying as David Attenborough. Well, no he doesn't, but it's a close thing. I'm not sure that I've read another Trek book that's so focused on an invasive animal (rather than one intelligent species invading another). Here there's an enormous fleet of hungry space whales descending like a swarm of locusts on various planets, and they're able to do so because the local space-faring ecology is out of whack. The solution is to restore the integrity of the food web. Truthfully - and the novel admits this - that food web is extremely basic, consisting of a very few species, and on a biological level this story wouldn't really work, I think, but this is handwavium biology and it's a nice change from all the other types of stories that Trek tells.

I do think that the ending tied up very quickly - it's basically Pike saying "and then we fixed it" - but I like Star Trek and I like ecological stories, so the mix of them together was fun. And the whales were saved, both from being destroyed and from becoming the destruction of everything around them, which was nice. 

The nostalgia factor is extremely high here, and I don't know why. I've neither read the book before nor been to Minnesota, and I certainly have never lived on the prairie grasslands. I think it's the sort of long, golden haze that seeps through so much of the summertime scenes, though - I often went to play in the river with my sister in the summer when we were kids, though thankfully there were rather less blizzards and locusts. From the moment someone in the book mentioned "grasshopper summer" I could see where things were going.

Honestly, I spent quite a lot of time wondering if those grasshoppers were edible. Well, they would have been an excellent sort of protein out on the plains, wouldn't they? Grind them up for flour and don't mind about the wheat... 

Fisher has a chatty voice, and is amusing when talking about the effect that Star Wars has had on her life. Her account of how she got the role of Leia, and what it was like filming that first movie, is the most entertaining thing here and I wish there had been more of it. There's a vast chunk of the book, however, that's given over to her affair with Harrison Ford - and it's told through her diary entries at the time. Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly) the adult Fisher is a much better writer than her teen self.

Look, she was nineteen years old. No high-strung nineteen year old in the midst of a love affair is writing a diary filled with good prose. They're writing the kind of overwrought, self-conscious rubbish that should probably be kept from the light of day. Most of what her diary entries evoked in me was relief that any journal attempts I made as a teen were short-lived and carefully destroyed. Secondly, they acted as a reminder (along with Tolkien - how many versions of fucking Húrin does one planet actually need?) of why I get rid of any writing drafts when the finished product is done. 

I don't fault her for not being a great writer at nineteen. I do kind of wonder what her adult self was thinking when she decided to share that not-so-great writing, though. Money, probably, and I can't really blame her for that. 

The Borg are back, because when you have antagonists as successful as these have been, they never, ever, get to die. Picard and company go up against them again, and the most interesting part of the story for me is Worf. He's refused the position of first officer because of a bad decision he made back in DS9, one which left him feeling he was not fit for command. His working through this was compelling.

The subplot with Admiral Janeway was not. This was a good book, but it would have been better without the idiot plot. When Picard senses the return of the Borg, she tells him to wait several days to investigate, dismissing the urgency of his concerns because of an admittedly valid suspicion that Picard's trauma is causing him to hallucinate things that aren't there. The thing is, if Picard is right and he does not investigate, the worst consequence is that the Borg take over everything. And if Picard is wrong and does investigate, the worst consequence is that Starfleet has to recall one of its captains for medical treatment. These things are not equivalent, and expecting readers to believe that Janeway can't reason it out is idiot plot. I hate idiot plot. I very nearly gave this book two stars because of it. 

This was fascinating! It took me a while to get through it, as I found it was best to stop every so often and sit with the chapters while I digested them. The scope of the book, after all, is so enormous that it can become overwhelming. Regardless, it's chock-full of ideas about the evolution, development, and culture of the human species. I don't know enough about history or anthropology to be able to fill in a lot of the gaps here - it seems churlish to call near-500 pages a brief sketch, but of course it is. How can it not be? - but I'm certainly interested in reading more.

As I made my way through the book, I found myself making notes of things to go look up, which to me is always the sign of an interesting read. My TBR list does not thank me, but my brain does. Books that spark ideas are my favourite type of books, and Sapiens is going on the list of books I have to get my own copy of, so that I can dip back into it in future. 

This is a beginner's guide to fandom - how to go to a convention, how to find other fans online, how to cosplay and so forth - that's directed entirely at women. The oft-repeated message is that fans, no matter their gender, should feel free to like what they like and make friends with other fans who like what they like, even if it's sometimes different. It's basically an entry-level text, which is fine: fittingly, the book is very accessible, being both friendly and laidback. The determinedly perky tone can get a little wearing, but then sometimes relentless positivity is what's needed, and if this book does encourage more women to embrace fandom then all credit to Maggs for laying out the welcome mat. 

I've got to say, though, just reading the description of mega-conventions like the San Diego Comic Con is enough to make me slightly anxious! I think I'll stick to the smaller cons with less people...