Long Ago and Far Away

Even in the wild wild world of e-publishing books have to have something of a return in order for a series to continue, and apparently Evan Currie's alternative history tale Steam Legion never quite demonstrated the legs to get anyone to invest in continuing the series. Which is too bad because it's a neat twist on both the alternative history and steampunk genres, offering a simpler and more realistic outing in the one and welcome new ground for the other in 2012's Steam Legion.

Dyna of Sparta studies under Heron of Alexandria in the first century Roman Empire. The long-simmering revolt of the Zealots in Judea has spilled out into other provinces, endangering the Egyptian city and its fabulous library. While the Spartans of her day are more of a joke than the feared fighters of legend, Dyna is of the line of Leonidas and is not about to abandon her teacher, his work or the knowledge the library contains to mobs operating under cover of devotion to their monotheism. As a Spartan noble she has some authority under Roman law and she marshals the few Roman soldiers still on station. They use working models of Archimedes' steam cannon built by Heron to repel the invaders. But enough escape to link up with other Zealot forces, and they will be back. Dyna, the Roman commander Cassius and Heron have only a brief window to put more of Heron's test models to work and help them defend the city before a Zealot army returns to destroy them all.

Currie has fashioned a straightforward story to introduce his planned series and he gives it very little distracting adornment. In our history, the city of Alexandria faded into obscurity despite its famous library, as partial destruction by Julius Caesar and neglect gnawed it to a slow death. The first Jewish-Roman war, unaided by secret Roman political manipulation, did not spread from Judea into Egypt. He tweaks history just slightly to rope in the city and library so he can introduce Heron and the obviously-destined-for-greatness scholar/warrior Dyna. As befits the intended first volume of a series, the characters are only partially developed outside the broadest strokes. Dyna carries the shame of the pale reflection her people are of their past as it spurs her to guard the honor of the line of Leonidas even more resolutely. Cassius is not at all sure a woman is the right person to follow into battle -- even more when she insists on working with the philosopher/artisan Heron and his contraptions -- but the results speak for themselves.

What Currie had planned for his cast following Steam Legion isn't clear, although they've drawn the attention and ire of some high-level plotters against the emperor Nero by thwarting their plans to foment unrest and their peaceful return to the Library seems unlikely. It works as a stand-alone, though, because his character development is organic as well as incremental; it serves the purpose of the story it's in as well as setting the stage for possibilities later. His battle scenes, including the fearsome new steam cannons, hit with force and reality and he's well-capable of accent spots of wry humor here and there to counter the potential ridiculousness of taking the story too seriously.

Since 2012 Currie has busily written a few series and a handful of stand-alone novels. They are surely genre fiction and don't aspire to be more than good diverting yarns with interesting situations and characters to root for. Steam Legion fits well within that category and has the advantage of being significantly better done that a lot of its competitors in the field.

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Just about anyone who knows the words to the "Marine's Hymn" knows that it includes the phrase, "on the shores of Tripoli." The actual battle involved is the Battle of Derna, originally planned to be one piece of a plan to put an American ally -- Hamet Karamanli -- on the throne of the Pasha of Tripolitania. The Pasha was one of the many Barbary states leaders who pirated shipping in the Mediterranean Sea and the United States had an eye on his removal and replacement with someone less predatory. Kevin Emmet Foley offers a slightly fictionalized version of the battle and its lead-up in his 2016 historical fiction novel Fort Enterprize.

The plan begins when American diplomat William Eaton heads to Egypt in 1804 to meet with Hamet and persuade him that with American help he can regain the throne from his brother, the usurper Yusuf Karamanli. Hamet recruits mercenaries to his cause, and US Navy Commodore Samuel Barron commits some small ships to provide shore bombardment when the invading force attacks cities. He also provides a small detachment of US Marines, led by 1st Lt. Presley O'Bannon, to help the land-based forces. They will have a long march overland from Alexandria to Derna but if they take it they will be within striking distance of Tripoli and be able to free captured American sailors.

Foley uses O'Bannon as his focal point, with a brief framing narrative about a writer distantly related to him who interviews him not long before he passes in 1850 to get the "true story" about the affair. Through interviews and some books O'Bannon has on the history of the Tripolitan conflict, we see the story unfold of Eaton's original plan, the suffering of the captive sailors, the long and hard march from Alexandria to Derna (called "Derne" by Foley) and the swirl of martial prowess undercut now and again by greedy and incompetent diplomats. Foley works to make his style have a Victorian air and influence with moderate success and he takes just enough liberties with history to make his story better. He also, in the framing narrative, highlights what O'Bannon's experiences with Barbary states slavery make him think of the somewhat milder but still repugnant version he finds when he returns home.

Enterprize clunks in some places -- the circumlocutionary style of the Victorian era or antebellum South is not easily mastered and there are places where the seams show. Better editing would help as well; "gentile" and "genteel" may resemble each other aurally but they differ widely in meaning. The aforementioned impact of O'Bannon's view of slavery is a nice touch in explaining how his story has an impact on his great-nephew, but we don't really find out why we should care.

The Battle of Derna is one of only two named locations in the "Marine's Hymn," representing the first time an American-led armed force ever captured an enemy stronghold on land and the first time the American flag flew over eastern hemisphere soil. Although negotiated settlements would eventually free American captives and undermine the work done by Easton, O'Bannon and the others, the Corps considers it a great marker in their long and proud history. Foley's book may not be the best historical fiction to cover the march to Derna and subsequent battle, but it's certainly an honorable homage and a reasonably enjoyable read.

The 21st Century Way

Burning books is old-fashioned and messy -- and probably, in the minds of the complainers in this story, environmentally problematic. If you just threaten the stores that sell books you don't like you can have the same impact without the risk of burning yourself. Or, you know, looking like the kind of people who burn books.

Fusion

A photographer has made a specialty of blending celebrity facial images using editing software to create hybrids of the two.

He deliberately chooses people with some similar facial features, which is probably why some of the blends just really look like one of the celebrities more than they do an actual blend. Number 29 might be a blend of Idris Elba and Mahershala Ali but it still looks like a picture of Elba. The collection at the link contains a couple male-female blends -- I suppose they might give an impression of what the children of such a couple might look like.

One thing I believe I can say for certain about them, though, is that no matter whose facial features are dominant in #12, the result has either a) never been funny or b) not been funny in a long, long time.

Definitions

I'm appalled at the rioting that took place in the United States Capitol on Wednesday. I'm appalled at the series of bone-headed decisions that made it possible, made it likely and made it last a lot longer than it should have.

I'm appalled (but not surprised) that the chump in the White House -- who, by the way, works for us -- didn't match his actions to his words and march his wrinkled Boomer "law and order" behind down to where a bunch of thugs were breaking stuff I as a taxpayer own and threatening my other employees in the House and Senate (who don't get much good work done when they're not being chased out of the building, let alone when they are). I'm appalled that two gents who've sold themselves as really smart guys because they clerked for Supreme Court justices understand neither history nor their operating instructions well enough to see that following the lead of Barbara Boxer as well as the engineers of the Compromise of 1877 are bad ideas.

I'm appalled at stupid tactical decisions that emboldened rioters enough to charge armed guards and get one of them killed. I'm appalled that this whole mess gives a group of people (the aforementioned employees) who do very little more than talk about themselves and posture the opportunity to do more talking and posturing. I'm appalled at the years-long history of people who keep trying, with the same single-minded delusion that you can pick up a cow chip by the clean end, to use the inexplicable appeal of the aforementioned chump for their own benefit and thus put him in a place where he can break things.

But attempted coup? Because some reform school dropout sat in the Speaker of the House's chair? Because some goon with a buffalo headdress ran through the rotunda? Let's say that these people were somehow able to occupy the Capitol Building. Just what levers of governmental power would they have then taken over? Just what would they have been able to do? The United States Congress met in a hotel for three months in 1814 because the British burned the Capitol Building down. A completely inaccessible Capitol Building would not weaken Congress's ability to do its job by one bit (an absence of TV cameras, on the other hand...) If this truly was an attempted coup, it was easily the most cuckoo coup imaginable.

Let's assess why this happened. Let's assess how this happened. Let's assess ways to reduce the chance it happens again. And then let us waste no more time on it. The human capacity for indignation may be inexhaustible but time and energy aren't -- and these mouth-breathing would-be "Rubespierres" and their vain, shallow Napoleon wannabe have taken up enough both already.

Updates

-- Last week this space mocked the Food and Drug Administration for its plans to assess a $14,000 fee on small distilleries that had switched production lines to creating hand sanitizer in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Well it turns out that this blog is read by the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, because he directed the FDA to not only not collect the fee but to remove it from the Federal Register. You may say that's because he read about it in one of the mainstream media outlets that reported on this matter as well, but until you produce conclusive proof that he does not read this blog I'll say it my way and you can say it yours.

-- Last May 4 some officers of the Lethbridge Police Service in Lethbridge, Alberta Canada responded to emergency calls about a person with a weapon in front of the Coco Villa Galactic Cantina. On arrival they observed a person in white plastic clothing and a helmet obscuring their features holding a black weapon of the general size of a rifle. They immediately ordered the person to drop the weapon and get on the ground, using force only when the subject failed to immediately comply with police commands. Officers also warned people away who were attempting to interfere with the performance of their duties. The subject was handcuffed and placed in the back of a patrol car while both she and the Cantina owner were questioned, and she was released when it was determined that no crime had been committed.

That's the way that the Lethbridge Police Service would like the story told, but people who remember it know that account leaves out the fact that the white plastic clothing and helmet were a Star Wars "stormtrooper" costume and the weapon was a chunk of plastic shaped like a "blaster." And it leaves out that the woman wearing the costume was trying to get to the ground in the mobility-limiting armor when she was shoved down hard enough to get a bloody nose and that the people warned away were recording this whole textbook exercise in stupidity on their cell phones when they were threatened with arrest for doing so, and that the owner was threatened when he was yelling that the woman was his employee, dressed up for a "May the Fourth Be With You" day at the business.

The Lethbridge Police Service did not investigate its own officers' conduct -- although you'd think that admitting you were smart enough to know your officers erred and how would be the wise course of action -- but turned it over to the Medicine Hat Police Service and the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team. Those bodies, after a thorough review of the evidence that took only seven months -- two months faster than the development of a vaccine for a brand-new virus the world had never before seen in humans -- have decided that the incident warrants the filing of no criminal charges against the officers.

Which, OK. If the investigation was trying to see if the officers' errors rose to the level of felony crimes I'd have to agree. And maybe even misdemeanors are a little excessive, but you'd think there's be something that they could at least write someone a ticket for. Like maybe "Failure to recognize one of the most ubiquitous characters of one of the largest movie franchises in history on a pop culture holiday dedicated to that franchise." Or, "Failure to differentiate between inert plastic toys shaped like no known firearm because they are meant to be fictional ray guns and actual firearms." That one probably with aggravated circumstances, because it occurred in broad daylight instead of some dimly-lit alley. Perhaps, "Failure to understand that if a stiff bullet-proof vest makes moving around harder to do then a head-to-toe suit of stiff plastic might make it even more so."

But no. So now any disciplinary action will come as a result of an internal professional misconduct investigation by the Lethbridge Police Service. My personal recommendation is that all of the officers be required to do foot patrol wearing Princess Leia's metal bikini for at least one full week. That has the advantage of potentially punishing whichever Lethbridge resident called police to begin with, by making sure he or she is exposed to the sight.

Middlin' Spies

The recent death of Sean Connery brought a blip in attention to his James Bond movies as examples of mid-60s attitudes and imagery, leaving co-authors Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens a prime debut point for their Bond homage about British MI6 agent John Sand, Come Spy With Me.

Sand, they suggest, is the actual spy on whom Ian Fleming -- who goes unnamed in the book -- based his Bond novels. The renewed notoriety of the books accompanying the major box office success of the movie series raised his profile and ruined his usefulness as a secret agent, seeing as how he wasn't all that secret anymore. So he retired and settled down with Stacey Boldt, the Texas oil heiress whose life he saved in his final adventure. As an executive with her company, Sand's time is taken up with deals and boardrooms instead of caper and bedrooms -- until the President of the United States sends an invitation to a meeting. Rogue elements of the CIA plot deadly and destabilizing moves in the Caribbean, and the President doesn't know who among his own people he can trust. Can John Sand, retired, happily married and rather averse to upsetting his wife by getting into the gunsights of enemy agents, help him? After all, nobody does it better.

Come Spy With Me takes a lot of great ingredients -- the swagger of mid-60s popular culture, the chance to take on a Bond-type character without the layers of icon varnish, the nostagia-strengthened moral certitude of honest American and English good guys vs. authoritarian and megalomaniacal bad guys -- and from them creates a pretty bland entrée. The book title riffs of a Frank Sinatra album and promises some good old-fashioned Rat-Pack 'tude that never really comes across, even though Frank and the boys make a swinging cameo early in the story.

The central plot of Sand trying to uncover and thwart the rogue CIA and organized crime elements who want the region open for their kind of business never really gets into high gear, almost seeming like a prologue to the personal dangers Mr. and Mrs. Sand may yet face from villains thought buried. Collins and Clemens reach for Fleming's energy but don't re-create it even with all of these kinds of meta-narrative touchstones at their disposal. In the same way that a program for a museum exhibit may show pictures of artwork that may be very well-done but aren't the work themselves, Come Spy With Me is a well-done homage to a character and an era while only being so-so done itself.

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National Review writer Jim Geraghty had some moderate success with his initial spy thriller, Between Two Scorpions. In it, he introduced us to the Dangerous Clique, an ad hoc team of United States agents aimed at only the most dangerous international baddies. The book did well enough that Geraghty was writing a sequel, set to be released in 2020. Then a worldwide pandemic happened, and the plot of the novel didn't work right in a world of COVID-19. So Geraghty shelved the story he had to that point and began a new one, this time taking the pandemic into account as he wrote Hunting Four Horsemen.

The Clique learns of a rogue biological weapons expert going by the name "Hell Summoner" who is offering his services to the highest bidder. Those services involve tailoring a virus to a population with shared genetic characteristics, even down to a single shared gene. The list of evil people who would love to possess a plague that would kill their enemies and not endanger their own population -- or at least, not endanger more than a small percentage of them -- is long and the only reason that someone hasn't gone ahead and hired this mysterious fiend is because he wants more money than all but a few players on the world scene have to hand. But a couple of them may get together and the Hell Summoner may lower his price, so the Clique have to move fast to track him down and learn who's hired him if they want to stop his horrifying plan.

Plenty of thriller authors will probably not write the pandemic into their storylines, but Geraghty is smarter than a lot of them are and he not only includes the reality of COVID into his fictional world but also into his plot. Unfortunately he does so with massive sections of tell-not-show infodumps that stall out the narrative almost to a dead stop. Obviously a world of travel limitations and widespread sickness and death would have an impact on everyone, including spies and operators. Among the Clique, the devil-may-care Alec has always been the group comic relief, but the weight of the devastation wrought by COVID leaves him uncharacteristically quipless for most of the book. Again that's not at all unusual, but Geraghty just tells the reader this rather than showing it.

Geraghty did an immense amount of research into the pandemic and possible causes for the viral spread during its early days. Unfortunately more than one chapter of Hunting Four Horsemen reads more like a good magazine or newspaper article than a suspense thriller. Horsemen has some good action sequences, a great in-joke nod to listeners of Geraghty and Greg Corombos' podcast The Three Martini Lunch and a marvelously inventive twist. Perhaps more time could have helped Geraghty work his extensive research more naturally into the other elements.

Even though Horsemen isn't as much of an improvement over Scorpions as a reader might want, it still gives some reason to look forward to the third outing of the Clique and not give up on them yet. 

The Lurking Menace Grows

Unfortunately the new year has not saved the unnamed midwestern town, as the snow goon discovers its horrifying power of modification...