octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This was an enjoyable read, and I appreciated the title pun! Marzluff argues that, far from being ecological deserts - I confess that was my impression - the suburbs are actually a haven for a diverse population of bird life. A population that is more diverse than that in city centres (unsurprising) and that in reserves (which did surprise me). Golf courses, too, believe it or not, are excellent for birds. Suburban life creates a patchwork of different habitats that can sustain more ecological niches, as do golf courses with their contrasting habitats of green and rough, and thereby can be populated by a greater variety of birds. It's not all good news - a lot of the rarer birds are pushed out of suburbia altogether due to more competitive generalists, necessitating reserves for those species, as well as birds which are human-avoidant, but it's an initially counter-intuitive outcome of ecology that I'd never considered.

Furthermore, because Marzluff is an ornithologist himself, many of the studies that back up his claims have either been performed by him, or in the case of his army of grad students, have been supervised by him. The experiments are explained and their results given context, and it's just a very interesting and thought-provoking collage of research.

You know, I've only read a handful of Verne's work, but I think this has been the most enjoyable of them so far, and when I say that I'm including Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Which probably shows a lamentable lack of taste on my part, but Verne tends to pedantry and there's often a lot of technical detail that I just can't bring myself to care about. And because for a lot of this book, the characters are floating on a raft - basically just planks nailed together - he can't go on and on about machinery or geology or what have you, he has to rely on plot and character. He's much more entertaining when he does. This is a short, action-filled adventure about a shipwreck. There's cannibalism and sharks and mutiny and it's pretty clear at every point what's going to happen, but the predictability doesn't make it any less enjoyable. Popcorn reading for the nineteenth century, and it holds up pretty well as such in this one as well.

This is a really interesting idea for a book! Most of the science and nature writing I read is on the more charismatic or exotic species; here, Holmes has restricted herself to her own back yard. It's not a particularly special back yard - she hasn't been manicuring it for decades or anything like that. It's an ordinary garden set in an ordinary neighbourhood in Maine, and she notes the changes in that garden, and the plants and animals that live in it, over the space of a year. Which is pretty much nature writing, but there's a lot of science here too, as she's consistently inviting scientists to come see her lawn and, for example, survey the ratio of natives to non-natives, or conduct a census of the insects there.

It's a good way of integrating science into typical nature writing, and I enjoyed the mix of genres... but I did find it a little tonally jarring. Much of the book is written in a very informal, chatty style, but that's regularly interrupted with a much more... not technical, but significantly more reserved writing when the science comes into play. The biggest example of this was the chapter on the geological history of Maine, stuffed into the Autumn section of the book. It felt a little out of place, to be honest, in subject as well as style, and I think I would have preferred it if the prose was more consistent all the way through.

In 1991, in a small community outside Boulder, Colorado, a mountain lion killed an eighteen year old student as he was running in the area around his high school. This attack was predicted by some in the local conservation community - and the possibility of it waved away by others in that same community, as mountain lions have been famously wary of humans in the past - and the lead up to, and the consequences of, this attack make up the book.

It's honestly pretty fascinating. The context of Boulder's environmental history, which has created large protected areas that have caused the local deer population to explode, has seen the slow recolonisation of the area by mountain lions, which were once hunted almost to extinction there. Those lions have, over time, become habituated to humans, no longer seeing them as threat. And indeed most of the residents of Boulder seemed thoroughly delighted to know that big cats existed in the region, and were occasionally rewarded with a glimpse of one. Thus the cats, feeling increasingly safe from interference, began wandering through back gardens and even, occasionally, eating a pet. And then they started going after humans...

The fascinating thing is that, even then, popular response was still to protect the lions. And, you know, I have sympathy for that, but the balancing act between protecting wildlife and protecting people is clearly a difficult one. As Baron points out, the history and emotions regarding conservation in Boulder came smack up against preservation of a different kind. It's really very, very interesting, with a considered presentation of all sides, albeit one that finally plumps for a more hands-on approach to wildlife management.

Also, that cover is gorgeous.

The Enterprise goes to a world shared between the Federation and another empire. Relations are mostly peaceful between the two, thanks to the fact that the two ambassadors, while not anything alike, have developed a friendship. Both ambassadors were done quite well, and even when outside sources conspired to pit them against each other, there was enough left of their unraveling relationship to turn away from slaughter until Data, Geordi, and Worf figured everything out. That's the kind of thing that Star Trek does well I think - the determined practice of soft power, between two old diplomats who like each other more than they should.

High point, though, was Worf's solution to the Doomsday World of the title. I won't give it away, but he was generally excellent here.

This is not great. I like the idea of a middle grade tie-in novel for Star Trek, but the giant plot hole sucks like the vacuum of space. Aliens lure Kirk and co. to an apparently deserted planet, in order to get the secret of warp drive out of them... but none of these people have ever met before, so how do they know about Spock's family life? The Federation is convinced the planet harbours no life, the aliens don't have the technological ability to leave the planet, there has been no interaction between the two parties in the history of ever, so why are the aliens signalling the Enterprise with Morse code???

The stupidity, it burns. It gets an extra point because I like the pictures, but the story is clearly aimed at school children who have been dropped on their heads.

A collection of stories that is far superior to the appallingly dreadful pulp cover it was saddled with.

In it is a very short story, "The Wheel", and I can't help but wonder if this was an early dry run for Wyndham's truly excellent novel The Chrysalids. The similarity is not so much in character (though the relationship between a young boy and an older relative prefigures that between David and Uncle Axel) but in the theme of post-apocalypse and religious repression. Given that The Chrysalids is one of my favourite books of all time, I found this a particularly interesting story, if one that's unusually heavy-handed for Wyndham. The remaining stories are all enjoyable, if not outstanding or even particularly memorable.

This has a godawful cover. What were they thinking?

The story is actually very good though. I'd give it a four star rating if it weren't for one element that bumped it down an entire star - more on that in a moment. I enjoyed the reveal of what the disturbingly weird space station was, and I liked how everyone worked together to make sure that what needed to be preserved got to be. I liked that there was no real bad guy, either, just something very alien that had been misunderstood. I very much liked the two visiting doctors who were the main guest stars of the book - the gentle pig-faced Tellarite who volunteered for dangerous missions to protect her patients and who kept her cool when the rest of the away team completely lost theirs. And the other doctor, a Vulcan, who developed a caretaker relationship with an orphaned Andorian child... those two were the high point of the book for me. Honestly, either of these two doctors could replace Crusher permanently and I'd be good with it. As I said, I was strongly tempted to give this one four stars, it's the most enjoyable TNG novel I've read in a while.

Apart from a section in the middle, where Riker succumbs to the same disturbing dreams that are plaguing the rest of the crew. His dream recalls an incident from his childhood, where his 15 year old self had an affair with a woman at least three times his age. Crispin presents the whole thing basically positively, and I'm distinctly unimpressed. He was a child. His lover was a predator. Reverse the genders and it screams taking-advantage by a mile. And you know what, I am not always a fan of Peter David's work, but a couple of TNG books before this one, in David's A Rock and a Hard Place, a 16 year old girl with a crush hits on Riker and he shuts that shit down hard, because she is a kid and he is too old for her, and that is what an adult is supposed to do. It is unfortunate that Crispin does not do the same here; I have zero interest in reading young teens get taken advantage of by adults. This is Star Trek. I expect it to do better.

Finally, on a milder note, I wish someone would forcefeed Data a dictionary of idiom and Brewer's Phrase and Fable, because his constant misunderstandings of informal speech have never been one hundredth as entertaining as every single TNG writer seems to think they are.

Four children, all having suffered tragedy of some sort and all essentially orphans, are discovered to have magic and brought to magic school, where they can't get on with anyone until they find each other. That's it in a nutshell, basically, and to be honest it is a little repetitive, with the book really too slight to give more than surface exploration to any of its characters. But it's still enjoyable, and as with most of Pierce's books that I've read, the vast majority of the characters are decent well-meaning people. I appreciate that.

I also appreciate that the magic these kids have is based in crafts. Weaving, for instance, and metalwork, that sort of thing, and they are expected to learn and practice these crafts in the same way as everyone else, as the better they are as craftspeople, the more useful their magic will be. I enjoy the focus on artisanship here; I think it's my favourite thing about the book. All I can think is that Sansa Stark, with her delight in sewing and textiles, would fit right in, and would certainly be better off in a series that doesn't sneer at her for wanting to make things.

I had no idea what the hidden city of the title was until I picked up the book, and it's Aberdeen, a place I have never been, and of which my sum total of knowledge was that it was very far north in Scotland, full of granite, and it rained a lot there. (There's a joke of doubtful truth, here in New Zealand, that when the Scots first settled here they chose Nelson, but the weather was too nice there so they went to Dunedin instead. I don't know where I heard that one, but heard it I have.) Woolfson's diary tracks the changes through the year, and it starts and ends in winter. The pages are full of snow, and rain, and her constant desire to see the aurora borealis, a desire which never eventuates though freezing winds are all too common, and not, I think, much compensation.

Most of the focus, though, is given to the creatures that live in her house and garden, the majority of which are birds. There's not a lot of what you'd call fancy wildlife here. Woolfson seems to have a particular predilection for the common and the disdained; she focuses on creatures like pigeons, sparrows, and rats, wondering how far she should go to make room for them in her house. A little mouse who wants to spend the winter inside and steals the odd tiny bit of food from her birds, fine. The rats that make a home under the house are less fine, but the guilt she feels in having them poisoned is constant. There's a strong focus here on learning to value common creatures for themselves, and the moral consequences of choosing to cause them harm. Why are her Aberdeen neighbours so vicious towards the grey squirrel, for example, and so welcoming to the red? (Though it's a late welcoming, given the national history of slaughter towards those same red squirrels.) It's a very thoughtful book, anyway, and if I do find it a tiny bit slow in places, I still really enjoyed it. And I want to visit Aberdeen now, so there's that.