Day: June 27, 2011

Book Review: In the Garden of Iden by Baker (2.5 Stars)

In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker

My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

My first exposure to Kage Baker’s writing and to her Company series. In our future (about two centuries ahead of us), both time travel and immortality are discovered. As with most time travel scenarios in science fiction, history can’t be rewritten, so said travel is of limited use to the plot and the science is foggy at best. Time travel then becomes a means to transport the reader to a different point in our past. Equally useless to the entrepreneurs of the 24th century is immortality, which can only be applied to very young children and requires extensive cybernetic enhancement.

The Company (aka Dr. Suess) still finds a way to make a buck, sending scientists back to the distant past, recruiting young children from the native population, installing immortality, and putting them to work by scavenging and salvaging priceless art, books, plants, etc. for re-discovery and re-sale (by the Company of course) in the 24th century.

Mendoza is an orphan from the Spanish Inquisition rescued and then recruited by the Company at the very edge of the Pit. After several years of operations and education, she receives her first field assignment, not in the New World (as she desired to be as far as possible away from ‘the monkeys’), but in dreary damp England. While collecting rare specimens from the Garden of Iden, she falls in love with one of the manor’s servants, a fiercely fanatical Protestant young man adrift in a resurgence of Catholicism courtesy of Queen Mary and Prince Phillip of Spain.

I enjoyed the historical aspects of the novel, especially England during the Counter-Reformation. Kage Baker did a good job of immersing me in both Spain and England. I still prefer Connie Willis’ writing style as evidenced in The Doomsday Book and her other Oxford time travel novels and stories.

I’m not a fan of romance, especially teenage romance (and Mendoza is in her late teens while on this first assignment), so I struggled through about half of this book. I also missed some of the humor (or failed to register it as such) exhibited by her fellow agents and their reactions to the ‘monkeys’ (the cyborg agents’ derogatory term for mere mortal men). The predictably tragic ending arrived to my great relief and the novel finally moved back to the original mission – preserving plants.

Perhaps I took the fear and loathing of the immortal agents towards human beings too much to heart. It concerned me that these agents of the Company felt such disdain and dread towards their former brothers and sisters. Commerce and computers seized the day, while the monkeys scampered about and threw bananas at each other. I got the distinct impression that the Company and civilization of the 24th century felt humans were irredeemably inclined to violence and destruction, in a constantly repeating cycle.

I read this novel as part of the Beyond Reality June 2011 book of the month selection for science fiction.  To follow or join in the discussion, please stop by our site.

Book Review: A Field Guide to the Stars and Planets by Pasachoff/Menzel

A Field Guide to the Stars and Planets (Peterson Field Guides)A Field Guide to the Stars and Planets by Jay M. Pasachoff

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I checked this dense compact field guide out from my local library in the hopes of using it in the field with my telescope. Due to its size and weight, I found it nearly useless to use in the dark with my red flashlight at my telescope. The atlases were too small, requiring my reading glasses, and the binding too stiff and tight to allow the field guide to be laid flat and free up a hand to adjust the telescope.

The information provided in the guide appears current as of a dozen years ago (circa 1998). I’ll run through the table of contents with some observations below:

1. A First Look at the Sky – How to differentiate between a star and a planet. Includes a pair of sky maps showing the brightest stars with arrows showing the pathways that help observers find them.

2. A Tour of the Sky – Highlights of the seasonal skies for both hemispheres and a bit on solar observing.

3. The Monthly Sky Maps – Maps are drawn to minimize distortions in regions of the sky most studied, using 45 degrees altitude (halway up the sky to the zenith).

4. The Constellations – History and origins of the constellations and where they can be found in the night sky.

5. Stars, Nebulae and Galaxies – Descriptions of stars, star clusters, nebulae, galaxies (including our own) and quasars. Includes color photographs of the most familiar objects.

6. Double and Variable Stars – Includes graphs and charts.

7. Atlas of the Sky – Fifty-two charts, each accompanied by a half-page (three or four paragraphs) detailing the best tourist destinations for the observer (like a travelogue for your vacation to the stars). This was the main reason I checked out this field guide but, as I mentioned above, the binding prevented me from effectively using this guide while out on my star safari.

8. The Moon – I read this chapter several times and used the excellent maps of the moon during an extended observing period (over several days) in April 2011.

9. Finding the Planets – Tips and timetables for tracking the planets (mostly the easily observed planets like Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn).

10. Observing the Planets – A tour of all the planets (including the recently demoted Pluto), with lots of color photos.

11. Comets – Description, observing and photographing tips.

12. Asteroids – Only two pages long, includes a table of the brightest asteroids.

13. Meteors and Meteor Showers – Table of major meteor showers and how to observe them.

14. Observing the Sun – Concise breakdown of the sun’s composition, but the majority of the chapter deals with solar eclipses and how to observe them.

15. Coordinates, Time and Calendars – Definitions of right ascension and declination and an analemma graph and photograph.

After reading this field guide, and being disappointed in its field usefulness, I decided upon the Sky & Telescope’s Pocket Sky Atlas for use on my observing nights. While the Pocket Sky Atlas lacks the travelogue features of this Field Guide, it makes up for that in ease-of-use and weightlessness.

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