Book Blurb. The City & The City by China Mieville

The City & The City by China Miéville

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is good, solid murder-mystery-thriller with a pretty intriguing twist. The whole thing takes place within two city-states occupying the same geographic area. So although the two cities are intermingled and generally mixed together, residents as a matter of course make a point of not seeing (or "unseeing" as they call it) anything that is a part of the "other" city. And while it may sound just outlandish enough to stretch the credulity of the whole story, Mieville actually makes it work by offering it as just another of those things we all do, without question, to keep society functioning in the manner to which we are accustomed.



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Book Blurb. Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the FaithCatholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith by Robert Barron

"Aristotle said that the best activities are the most useless. This is because such things are not simply means to a further end, but are done entirely for their own sake. Thus watching a baseball game is more important than getting a haircut, and cultivating a friendship is more valuable than making money The game and the friendship are goods that are excellent in themselves, while getting a haircut and making money are in service of something beyond themselves. This is also why the most important parts of the newspaper are the sports section and the comics, and not, as we would customarily think, the business and political reports. In this sense, the most useless activity of all is the celebration of the Liturgy, which is another way of saying that it is the most important thing we could possibly do.

My own total lack of interest in sports notwithstanding, this passage does a good job, I think, of capturing the heart of why I remain a devoted Catholic. That sense of God's values being mostly the polar opposite of the World's values is, for me, a large part of what following Christ is all about.

My one disappointment with the book is that it does feel very much like it's preaching to the choir. I found myself nodding in agreement with most of it and enthusiastically agreeing with bits of it, and finding almost all of it to be familiar and well-trod territory. There was really nothing here to challenge me or force me to re-think or see anything in a new light. And I've always felt that religion and religious thought is pretty much useless if it doesn't challenge one's comfort zones or prompt the occasional re-thinking of one's accustomed values. Although I will say that this book does a very good job of stripping away the fluff and boiling down to the essence of what a Christ-centered life is all about -- and the reminder of what is truly important certainly has value. So maybe it did prompt me to re-think some long-held assumptions after all...?

On the whole, this book was a very good refresher on why I am and remain a Catholic.


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Four Doctors, chapter 3

The TARDIS landed with a solid “thunk”.  The Doctor frowned over the console readouts.

Rose tentatively loosened her grip on the support beam she’d been clinging to.  “Have we stopped?”

“Stopped?" The Doctor snorted something remarkably close to a laugh. "Relatively speaking, the entire Universe is expanding outward at a rate slightly greater than the speed of light. Nothing is ever 'stopped', really.” He gave her a quick glance, a spark of humor in his eye.  “But for now we're anchored to a planetary gravity well.  We’ve landed.”

“Landed where?” Rose joined him by the console to stare at a bank of blank screens.

 “Can’t say,” the Doctor mumbled, punching at some buttons and re-checked his readouts.“That jaunt through the time corridor fried a few circuits so I can’t get a reading.”  He poked in frustration at the controls once more. “We’ve set down just beyond the corridor’s terminus but where and when that is exactly …” he slammed his mallet into the readout panel and re-adjusted some dials, all to no avail. He turned and strode purposefully toward the door.  “We’ll have to go outside and get our bearings.”

“Is that safe?”

“Probably not,” he replied brightly, and threw open the door.

He stepped out and looked around to get a sense of the place.  They were in the middle of a city but somewhat removed from the bustle of downtown by a wide, slow moving river to his right.  The rising sun hung low in the sky to his left.  He took in the trees lining the streets and sniffed the air.

“Definitely Earth,” he said as Rose stepped up beside him.  “Mid Twentieth-Century, I’d guess.  Late summer.  Some fifty years or so before your time.”  What he didn’t mention was a strong stench of death in the air.  They were in the middle of a war – most likely World War II. Again.

He strolled down to the edge of the river, nodding a greeting to a small, plump old man sitting contentedly at the riverbank, studying a chessboard set up beside him. He seemed to be waiting for someone to come along and join him. The man smiled and lifted his hat, reminding the Doctor of himself in a previous life -- not so very long ago, and yet it seemed so irretrievably distant.

“Nice day,” the Doctor observed, as he squatted beside the man and moved a black pawn on the chessboard. "Good day for a game."

“It is,” the man said with a grin.  “It is always a good day for chess.” He moved one of his own pawns in answer to the Doctor's opening.

“Good way to spend a morning,” the Doctor said. He shifted another piece on the board and settled to the ground.

“You speak Japanese,” the man observed as he made his next move. He seemed more intent on the conversation at this point than on the game.

“I do,” the Doctor replied.  It was technically true, and easier than trying to explain the TARDIS and its translation matrix.

“You’re not a spy, are you?” the man asked benignly.

“Why, are we at war?”

“I hope not,” the man said. He sighed heavily, shaking his head.  “Too much war.”

The Doctor nodded.  The two of them sat quietly, alternately staring out at the river and studying the chessboard between them.

The Doctor had only just left behind that one-time-Time-Agent-now-con-artist whose carelessness had almost wiped out the human race in 1941. And now he had stumbled upon a time corridor somewhere in the middle of the same world war. Coincidences like that made him uneasy.

And there was a sense of deja-vu about the place. Not just the physical location, though it did seem familiar. But something niggled at his temporal senses. He suspected they were very near one of Earth's many unchangeable fixed points -- a notion which made the time corridor's presence here that much more troubling.

Rose sat down beside the Doctor and watched his dark brooding for a bit. Then she turned to the other man.

"Hi! I'm Rose."

The Japanese grinned and tipped his hat in a way she found charmingly old-fashioned. "I am Kenji Watanabe," he replied. "It is a pleasure to meet you, Rose. And he ... he is Thorn?"

Rose laughed at that. She bumped the Doctor playfully with her shoulder. "Ah, the Doctor's not so bad once you get to know him."

"Nah," the Doctor said. "Once you get to know me I'm much worse." He moved a bishop, but continued to be distracted by a vague unease about his surroundings.

Rose reclined on the grass, gazing up at the early morning sky. Mr. Watanabe brought one of his knights into play on the board. He leaned in toward Rose to speak confidentially, but loud enough for the Doctor to hear. "Your friend, Doctor Thorn, he is trying to checkmate in six moves."

"Not trying," the Doctor said, flashing a toothy grin and shifting a rook into position. "Do or do not. There is no try." Leaning in toward Rose, he went on: "Little bit of advice I gave a young aspiring filmmaker once. Nineteen-sixty-something, Modesto California. I hear he's done pretty well for himself since then..."

"Today you do not," said Mr. Watanabe with a grin, as one of his pawns came forward to guard the square the Doctor had been headed toward.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows in appreciation. "Impressive," he said. He brought a knight into play. "This game might actually take me ten moves."

"You play well," Kenji said with a grin, as he moved a bishop off to the sidelines. "But I think perhaps you do not play quite so well as you think."

"You're probably right," the Doctor said with a grin as he repositioned his rook. "But near enough. I play to win."

"I also play to win," replied Kenji, as he moved his knight. "And you are in check."

The Doctor stared, slack-jawed, at the chessboard. "Fantastic," he enthused.

"Doctor," Rose interrupted, still looking toward the sky.

But the Doctor ignored her, intent on retracing Kenji's moves on the chessboard. "This is really something," he gushed.

"Doctor," Rose repeated, more urgently.

"I mean I'll still win," the Doctor went on, "but I haven't had a challenge like this since, I don't remember when."

"Doctor!"

"What, Rose?"

"Well I was just thinking it seems strange that that's the first airplane I've seen all morning, and it might be worth pointing out to you, is all."

"Yes, well. There's a war on, you know, and..." The Doctor paused a moment and followed her gaze skyward. "Bloody hell!"

Suddenly the Doctor was pulling her to her feet and propelling her up the hill. "Get back to the TARDIS!"

"Doctor," she called breathlessly as she ran. "...Doctor, we... this is..."

"Back to the TARDIS!"

As she reached the top of the hill, the Doctor grabbed her hand and pulled her roughly across the lawn. She stumbled in through the TARDIS door and collapsed to catch her breath. The Doctor had only just got the doors shut when the world outside exploded into a blinding white-hot light. She could feel the TARDIS around her shudder as if it were buffeted by strong winds.

"Doctor..." Rose turned on him. "He was out there!"

"Yeah," the Doctor growled. "Him and a hundred-thousand like him. Ordinary people, living their ordinary lives, in Hiroshima, Japan. They all die today, and there is not a bloody thing we can do about it."

"But Doctor...!"

"You think I like it? I hate it. With every fiber of my being I hate it. But I can't change it."

"So," a soft-spoken voice behind them broke in. They turned to see Kenji Watanabe, gazing around him at the TARDIS console room. "So this box of yours ... it is bigger than it looks."

Four Doctors, chapter 2

“Oi, Spaceman!  A little warning next time you’re going to do the barrel rolls!”

Donna picked herself up off the floor, clinging tightly to the nearest girder.  The TARDIS did seem to have stopped spinning for the moment, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

“Sorry, sorry!”  The Doctor circled the console like a hyperactive ferret in pinstripes, frantically twirling knobs and flipping switches.  “We got caught in a time corridor.  Little hairy there for a while.  We’re out now.  Nothing to worry about.  All under control.”

“Are there any seatbelts in this tub,” Donna asked, “you know, just in case?”

“Yeah, no.  Not really.  Sorry about that.  The Old Girl here is usually more steady than that.”  He gave the TARDIS console an affectionate pat.  “Time corridor just caught her off-guard.  Nasty things, time corridors.  Crude, primitive technology, real navigational hazards … almost never used any more. Don’t think I’ve encountered a time-corridor since … well … not since I was a fair-haired youth in cricketing garb with a bit of celery on the lapel, which is neither here nor there. But this …”

He put on his glasses and frowned over a monitor. “…this one is quite recent … and very much in use, it looks like.  Well that can’t be good.”

“Why can’t it?”

“Well in my experience, and understand I’m only speaking from -- ooh -- about nine-hundred and four years of experience here, but in my experience when someone is using a shielded, stabilized time corridor they’re probably up to no good.  Or they’re in over their heads and likely to go creating nasty paradoxes and … well, a big old glopping mess seeping into the fabric of space-time and it’s just not good.”

“Oh, come off it,” Donna chided.  “You seem to do okay traveling through time without adult supervision.”

“I am the adult supervision,” the Doctor replied soberly.    

“That’s really how your lot see yourselves…” A brief, sharp look from the Doctor cut her off.  “Saw yourselves,” she continued in a chastened tone.

“That’s what we were,” the Doctor replied.  “Oldest sentient race in this part of the Universe, we’d made all the mistakes and learned from them, mostly, by the time the rest of you lot were crawling out of the primordial ooze.”

“And you couldn’t just sit back and let the rest of us learn from our own mistakes like you did.”

“Well, the Universe is more crowded now.  Too many races mucking about with space-time.  Little mistakes have more consequence now than they did back in our day.

“Mind you,” he continued, “I did always prefer the mentoring approach.  Let them all make their own mistakes and we’d be on hand to help out, clean up, minimize the damage…”

“Like you do now,” Donna said.

“Like I do now,” the Doctor echoed.   “Like I’ve always done.  I was their conscience, you might say.  A little niggling sense of perspective in the Great Time Lord Institution.  That was always my role.  Self-appointed, of course.”

He looked again at the screen in front of him.  “A unidirectional vortex,” he said, as much to himself as to Donna.  “It’s taking someone from fixed point to fixed point, and it’s a one-way trip.  Oohh, somebody’s definitely up to no good here.”

He adjusted some controls to change the TARDIS’s course.  “So what say we nip on over and see what it’s all about.”

The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS and took in the dusty, dry, utterly barren landscape around them. "Well," he announced, "here we are."

“And 'here' is where, exactly?” Donna asked.

The Doctor was already fiddling with a small gadgety device he had pulled from the pocket of his overcoat. Donna wondered if those pockets, like the TARDIS, were somehow bigger on the inside.

“We are at … or rather very near … the opening of the time corridor," the Doctor explained as he poked at buttons, turned knobs, and studied the blinking lights on his gadget.  "Actually it starts over there a bit …” he gestured past a small rise of hills behind them, “and, well, sometime within the next few hours or so.”

“Yes, but where are we?”  Donna persisted.

“You know I can’t really say,” the Doctor replied.  “Somewhere just before we landed, our navigational readings went off the scale.  Says we’re outside of space and time now.”

Donna took in their bleak surroundings. “So outside of space and time looks like … this?”

 

“It looked a lot whiter last time,” the Doctor mused to himself.  

“No,” he said decisively.  “But I daresay I have been here before…” He crouched to the ground, pinched some dust between his fingers, put it on his tongue.  The taste was intense – acrid and evil.  He spit it out again.

“War,” he said.  “Long, brutal … generations of unrelenting destruction, raging on a long-dead planet…”

The words “dead planet” triggered something, causing memories to snap into place.  “Oh, no,” he said.  He turned and sprinted to the top of the hill.

“No,” he shouted.  “No, no, no, no, no!”

Donna joined him at the top of the hill.  Below them was what remained of a large city.  Once gleaming, now tarnished metallic buildings stood in ruins.  The cracked and broken remnant of a giant transparent dome encircled the city limits.

“Skaro,” the Doctor said.  “We’re on Skaro.”

“And that’s bad?”  Donna asked.  It certainly didn’t look good, and the Doctor’s whole demeanor told her it was probably worse than it looked.  But she hoped to prompt some explanation from him.

“Ooh, it’s worse than bad,” he said.  “It’s so many different levels of bad I don’t even know where to start.”

He looked to his left.  Far across the plain, an army was advancing – an army of Daleks.  Spread out to the horizon, as far as he could see, wave after wave of Daleks glided ominously, unrelentingly toward the battered city.

“We have to get out of here,” the Doctor said, pulling Donna back down the hill, back toward the TARDIS.   

“We have to leave now.”

To be continued.

<Next Chapter

First Chapter> 

Four Doctors: A Dabbling in Fan-Fiction

A while back, inspired by an offhand comment in an online Doctor Who discussion, I began pondering a storyline that might work as a kind of new-series "Three Doctors", bringing together the three actors who have to date played the title role in the new Doctor Who series. I thought the Time War, being "time locked" against outside intrusion, provided a good excuse to keep it simple -- confine it to the post-war Doctors, lest it get too unwieldy with eleven Doctors and their attendant companions all running around looking for something to do. But bringing the War into it meant including the Eighth Doctor, the one who by all accounts was actually involved in the war. 

Thus, my little experiment with fan fiction. I give you The Four Doctors. At least until I come up with a better title.


The story begins with the current Doctor, the eleventh. For those keeping track, the time is somewhere after the Christmas special, well before the start of season 6 -- after Amy and Rory have had their honeymoon, well before the events of "Impossible Astronaut", in that vaguely defined period where they are newlyweds traveling with the Doctor.

Chapter one.

---

“Doctor, how long have these eggs been here?”  Rory’s voice emerged from somewhere around the back of the icebox.

Amy sat at the table in the TARDIS kitchen, nibbling a biscuit.  The Doctor sat across from her, by all appearances engrossed in combining a tabletop particle accelerator with a pop-up toaster.  And Rory, determined to have a proper breakfast for once, searched for something he could recognize as edible.

The Doctor finished splicing some wires and looked up.

“What?" he demanded. "Can't you see I'm tinkering here?”

“These eggs, Doctor?”

“Yes, by all means, help yourself,” the Doctor snapped as he turned his attention back to his work.

“These eggs that say ‘use by June 27, 1976’…?”

“Yes, as I said, help yourself.”

"Doctor, how long have these been in here?" Rory asked.

The Doctor rolled his eyes. "Rory, Rory, Rory. I know you've only just joined on but do try to understand the concept. Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. We are traveling outside of space-time as you understand it, ergo, your question has no meaning in this context."

"I'm simply asking, Doctor, how long has it been since you were in 1976 buying eggs?"

“I don't know,” the Doctor said, turning his attention back to his tinkering. "A while, I suppose. Really, nothing about the 1970s worth going back for.”

“So, my question, Doctor …?”  Rory began, brandishing the carton of eggs.

“Except the scarf,” the Doctor went on idly, speaking now to nobody in particular.  “I did like that scarf.”

“The eggs, Doctor…” Rory let a note of exasperation into his voice as Amy barley suppressed a snicker.

“Wait, what scarf?” she asked.

“My scarf,” the Doctor replied.  “I wore a scarf back then.”

“What, like a silk scarf…?”

“No.  Wooly. Stripey. Long, very long thing.”

“So you just wore a scarf ... a long wooly scarf … like, as a fashion statement?”

“Why not?” A defensive note crept into the Doctor’s voice.  “Scarves are cool.”

“How long, Doctor?”  Rory asked.

“Oh fifteen, twenty feet at least, must have been.  Always dragging on the floor…”

“How long ago?”

“Several lifetimes ago. Half-dozen or more, I'd suppose. Whatever did become of that scarf…?”

“You're saying these eggs have been here, what, thirty?  Seventy-five?  Four-hundred years?”

“They should have hatched, grown up, and laid more eggs several times over by now,” Amy said with a laugh.

“I replaced it with a stick of celery,” the Doctor mused to himself.  “Celery.  Definitely not cool.”  Then snapped his attention to his companions. “The eggs? No, they've been in the stasis cabinet all that time. Rory, don't stand there with the door open. You're letting the entropy in.”

Rory bit back whatever response he was considering.  He slammed the cabinet door shut, shooting the Doctor the most withering glare he could manage, and headed toward the stove.

And then the world around them lurched violently.

To be continued.

< Chapter 2 

Random Writings

A couple writings of mine that are out there on the web right now. 

First up, a brief review of a little independent film I came across recently. Read it at Cinemaroll.com.

Second, a short-short story I wrote some time ago, now residing here at Authspot.com.

Enjoy!

And In the Darkness Bind Them

A while back, on one of their weekend programs, NPR was soliciting short-short fiction pieces. The one time I participated, the guidelines were fairly basic: One character in the story has to tell a joke and one character has to cry. The following is what I came up with.

 They had retreated to the honeymoon suite, extracted themselves from their formal-wear, and collapsed in a lifeless stupor on the bed.  They wouldn’t have had the energy to do anything if they’d wanted to.

Everyone had told her what a beautiful wedding it had been.  “Perfect” was the word they most often used.  And of course she smiled and nodded and agreed that everything had gone off without a hitch, exactly as planned.

But still she couldn’t get over his little impromptu amendment to their vows – the vows they had written together and worked on and reworked and polished to perfection.  And there, in the middle of the ceremony, surrounded by all their friends and family, associates and co-workers and distant cousins, in front of everyone who had ever been anyone in their lives, he put the ring on her finger with the words, “One Ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them”.

 “Why did you do that?” she asked him.

 “It was funny,” he said.

“You should have told me.”

“I wanted to surprise you.”

“You should have warned me.”

“It would have spoiled the surprise.”

“So instead you spoiled our wedding.”

“I didn’t spoil it,” he said.  “It was a great wedding.  Everyone had a great time.”

She wanted to tell him that was beside the point, but didn’t know how to say it without it sounding like she was being petty and selfish. 

Instead she asked him, “Anyway, what does it even mean?”

“What does what mean?”

“That ‘One Ring to rule them all…’?”

“It’s from Lord of the Rings…”

“I know that,” she snapped.  “What does it mean?  In our wedding ceremony, what does it mean?”

“Nothing.  It was a joke.”

“So why make it part of our wedding if it doesn’t mean anything?”

“Because,” he said with an exasperated sigh, “it’s an ironic commentary on gender roles in the modern marital institution.”

“Well maybe I didn’t want ironic commentary to be part of my wedding.”

“Well maybe I did want ironic commentary to be part of our wedding.”

“That’s why you have a blog, for all your ironic commentating needs.”

He shrugged noncommittally and lay quietly, examining the plain gold band on his finger.

“So my sister would be Gollum, then,” she mused.  “Did you see the way she went after the bouquet?  Practically tackled your cousin for it.  ‘We wants it!  We needs it!  Give it to usss!’”  she giggled.

He shook his head.  “But she’s never actually had the ring herself.  She’s going after some imaginary idea of what it means, what she thinks it could do for her.  She’s more like Boromir.  Or Sauruman.” 

She stared at him, watching him twist the ring on his hand, wondering if he was still joking.

“What does that make us?” she asked.

He shrugged.  They had allowed the metaphor to go too far, leading to thoughts of their future together.  A life prolonged, extended beyond its natural course until it faded into shadow, tired of life but unable to die, held completely in the thrall of a simple bit of plain jewelry.

A small sound escaped from somewhere in the back of his throat.  He rolled over, settling in for sleep and turning his back on his wife.

“Hey,” she said.  “Hey, are you crying?”

“No,” he lied, and shoved his face in the pillows.