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In my post about Safari, and two things about it that suck, I linked a rather interesting couple of curses back to Diane Duane's weblog. This evidently caused some confusion, as the great lady herself commented on this confusion in the Safari post, and added some clarification on her weblog so as to help out those of you who wander there, and become lost.

However, being the verbose bastard I am, I can't let this go without some comment about the quote, the book which contains it, and the author who wrote both.

Technorati Tags: Authors, Books, Diane Duane, History, Irish Curses, Writing

The particular curse, or more accurately, curses come from Ms. Duane's Star Trek book, Spocks World. Spock's World is, as you can probably guess, about, well Spock, and Vulcan. It has two plots actually. One is a history of Vulcan from the beginning. (Literally, from the beginning of the world), and the other is a "current" one about the planet government being manipulated into a planet-wide debate and vote on complete secession from the Federation. Ms. Duane does this in alternating chapters, a difficult trick to pull off, but she nails it. (If you haven't read it, this isn't a spoiler. To think that merely talking about the plots could ruin such a fantastic book is idiocy.) Part of the "History of Vulcan" bits spend a lot of time on Spock's father, Sarek of Vulcan, and how he became first an ambassador to Earth, then a husband to Amanda Greyson, and later, a father to Spock. The curses are used during Sarek and Amanda's courtship, and are the cause of much amusement to Sarek. (Yes Vulcans do laugh. Only in private, amongst family. As the book says, mastery and suppression are very different things.)

The first one, about the turnip, happens during an argument over the translation for a Vulcan word for war. Amanda was working on the Universal Translator project, and as Sarek was the new Ambassador, they had cause to work together quite often. Sarek was a little too smug about being right, and...She caused him to laugh out loud for the first time in many years when, after a disagreement over the translation of a world for war, that he should only grow headfirst in the ground like a turnip.

The second, longer one happens in the same paragraph, in the next sentence actually: Later that month, when he was right about something again and made the mistake of not immediately down-playing it, she issued him with a formal malediction, wishing that the curse of Mary Malone and her nine blind orphan children might pursue him so far over the hills and seas that God Almighty couldn't find him with a radio telescope. Sarek laughed so hard at that that he entirely lost his breath, and Amanda panicked, and start to give him cardiopulmonary resuscitation, which was useless, because his heart was somewhere other than the spot on which she was pounding. It took him nearly an hour to recover: he kept laughing. He had never been cursed like that, not even by union leaders, and it was very refreshing.

Damnit. I've been using that curse ever since I read it, and getting it wrong for the most part. I beg forgiveness. Oh, yes, and ladies, don't knock the ability to verbally beat someone with style. Guys appreciate that more than you may think ;-)

However, that's the merest scratching of the surface of why I read Ms. Duane's work. The truth is, I've been reading every book I can buy with her name on it since the publication of Star Trek novel #13, The Wounded Sky. The plot of the book is fairly standard Star Trek...new engines cause rip in space - time continuum resulting in enormous space wedgie of ultimate cosmic power, the Enterprise saves the day, etc. However, that is the only standard part. It's sandwiched in between two rather blah Star Trek books. Coincidentally, thirteen is one of my lucky numbers. That was a minor hint. When I read the book, it blew me away. If I were to be literal about it, it was like a hurricane. Not for some great Star Trek-ness thing, but the...care she took with it.

You see, when you talk about a well-established canon like Star Trek it's almost easy to be lazy. You don't have to explain Warp Drive, or what people do on the Enterprise, as you're primarily writing to and for people who are fans. As well, when some do try to explain certain things, well, the explanations tend to suck. Diane Duane not only did not suck, but she made quite a few other authors move, at least in my eyes, from "Pretty good" to "Kinda sucky". It wasn't that they were bad, or had become bad, far from it. It was that Ms. Duane had taken the bar, and not just set it higher, but strapped a rocket to it. A rocket with a LOT of fuel....and Warp Drive.

Have you ever read a book, and suddenly realized that it was going to be far more than you expected? That it was going to be so much better than you thought, there's not enough letters in the word "better" to convey the better-ness that it is describing? It started to happen in the first paragraph, where Ms. Duane is describing a ship in warp drive. By the end of the fourth paragraph, she's done that, and used a quasi-collision between a ship in warp, and a comet, and the effect that will have on a primitive world in three hundred years. I was pretty impressed, I mean, four paragraphs, and some heady stuff has happened. but it was the fifth paragraph though, that was the sign that I was reading something special:

Here and now, an unseen something fleets by so swiftly an observer would probably never perceive her at all. A flicker, a shimmer, a passing thought in the endless silent ruminations of the universe, the USS Enterprise cruises through on patrol.

It was just so...visual and visceral at the same time. I've always been a very visual reader. When I read a book I like, at some point, it stops being reading, and the book becomes a movie. I see what's happening, I hear it. It's probably a large part of my reading speed, which even my girlfriend, a reader so avid she's a librarian, finds impressive. (when you impress a librarian, you read FAST) So for me, a good descriptive talent is important. I blew off two classes that day, and sat in the FIU Rat, drinking my cokes, and devoured that book. I inhaled it. But I couldn't stop. There were so many things right about it. She was the first author I'd ever read to get space battles right. She wrote about a ship that was massive, yet unencumbered by such pissant things like friction and gravity. She wrote about dealing with excess velocity and momentum! Like this part, from a battle between Enterprise and eight Klingon ships:

But Enterprise wasn't running her part of the battle according to the sensible, reasonable tactics they were expecting. Since nearly everyone in the Galaxy now had the Romulans' "cloaking device"—making it almost impossible to initially detect a ship in realspace, let alone bring it to battle there—the methodology of starship-level warfare had changed in recent years. Ships running almost entirely on instruments ambushed one another in warp, where the cloaking device didn't work, and fought whole battles there; or forced a ship in warp out into realspace, where running tended to be difficult for large ships and firepower was the determining criterion. Enterprise, though, wasn't following the rules. She would not fire. She would not duck into warp, however closely Kaza and his brother destroyers followed her. Instead, she swooped and soared and dipped and rolled through realspace as if a suicidal maniac piloted her. The Klingons' battle computers didn't have the necessary protocols programmed into them for this kind of realspace fighting; no one could get close enough for even hyperphaser fire to pierce those shields powered by the whole unreserved output of an undamaged warp drive. Anyone who tried soon enough heard the sound of screaming, overstressed metal in his ship's structure, and fell back to a saner, straighter pursuit, swearing—

It wasn't just space battle. She took that kind of care with the various stars and systems. One of Ms. Duane's hallmarks is that she uses real galaxies and real physics wherever she can in her books. She made sure that by the end of things, you knew why the Enterprise crew is the best of the best. No longer were Sulu and Chekov just drivers on a bus. They were master helmsman and navigators and weapons systems officers, capable of out-flying anyone, anywhere, anytime. Uhura was not just a high-tech operator, but a polyglot with multiple Ph.D's who not only ran the entire communications department on Enterprise, but had made major contributions to the science of translation. McCoy went from just a doctor to a leading medical researcher and pioneer. She even took the time to deal with such mundane things like meeting rules, and departmental shift change issues, supply and logistics, even the difficulty involved in planning a party when one of your crewman is a Horta and considers granite a delicacy. That's proper care and feeding of her universe, and the results are what they should be.

It wasn't just the crew of Enterprise that gets the "Duane Treatment". Every ship she talks about in Starfleet is full of motivated, smart, talented people. After all, they had to get through Starfleet Academy to get to where they were. She made being an officer on a Starship into what it should be, not just a body in a uniform, or a plot device. She made sure that we understood that any race able to make it into space, invent warp drive, and carve out an empire or Federation was not stupid. The Romulans, the Klingons, all of them become what you expect. For Enterprise to defeat yobbos with forehead deformities, or angry Vulcans is no big deal. But when those enemies suddenly become very smart, and very clever, and just as quick-witted as you, well, beating them starts to mean something.

I discovered Diane Duane in 1984 in college. It was a few years later, in the Air Force, that I joined the Sci-Fi book club and saw her name on a non-Star Trek work. A collection of three of her books called Support Your Local Wizard. If I had admired her work before, I became a drooling fanboy after reading that book. I stopped counting how many times I've re-read it after ten or so. So much of what she wrote about resonated with me. The way Nita was the favored target of bullies...I'd been there. I may be 6'2", have a black belt, and be able to run a 7-minute mile now, but when I graduated high school, I was 5'6", 260lbs, poor, and had a big goddamned mouth that continually wrote checks my body couldn't cash. The scene, early in the first book, where Nita hides from the bullies in the Library? I'd done that, and not a few times.

People may call that series the "Young Wizards" series, and book stores may file it in the dungeon that is Teen Fiction instead of in its proper Science Fiction and Fantasy location, and it may have been totally ignored, even though every.other.friggin' book about witchcraft and wizardry was laid out next to the sixth Harry Potter book when it was released, but it's not a kids book. They talk about important stuff, like helping people because it's the right thing to do, not just for what you can get out of it. They talk about keeping your word, even though to do so will cause you great inconvenience, harm, or death, because keeping your word matters. They talk about how not only does the end not justify the means, but how the means matter more than the end. They also have a rather obvious affection for Apple Computer, which never hurt anything. Even the Wizard's Oath was pretty heady stuff:

In Life's name and for Life's sake, I say that I will use the Art for nothing but the service of that Life. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so -- till Universe's end.

Is it maybe hokey? Okay, so what? Read what it says...it's a good message, no matter the setting or the hokey level. Good messages are rare enough for me to ignore one right in my face like that.

Because of that series, I'll never look at a cat, a dog, or even a bird the same way again. And I have more respect for trees.

I gave a Young Wizards collection to my girlfriend on her birthday. We weren't dating yet, but in a way, that was kind of where it started. When a friend of mine was despairing because her son had been convinced that he'd never read well, I sent her a Young Wizards collection, and told her to read it to him, because I knew that it would be something they could share together, and that it would help him to see the other side of reading, that it is something to be enjoyed and cherished, not some onerous task to be endured. It was the first major book I ever read to my son. To this day, if I want to re-read one of them, and I often do, I don't bother looking on the bookshelf for them. They're in his room, under his pillow, or somewhere near his bed. I just know that when he moves away to college, I'll have to buy him his own copies, so I can get mine back.

That's okay, I'll do it happily. Like I'd complain about his love of reading, pff.

To delve even deeper into hokey, I'll say that Ms. Duane's work more than resonated with me. It helped me get through some hard times by remembering that we don't do good for any reward, or what we get from it, or what other people think. We do good because good is worth doing.

Any time you see me link to her site, it's not just me attributing a quote. It's me saying "Thank you", yet again.

Thank you ma'am.

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