Bull: Abaddon’s Gate, p. 217

Yes, it has taken half the afternoon for self to move ahead nine pages. But to be honest, she’s been so distracted by the news. Last night, she watched the escalation of the protests and there were rubber bullets being fired (at journalists) and tear gas and all kinds of mayhem. She prays no one gets hurt tonight.

As the day winds down, self settles down for her most deeply immersive reading. It’s a good thing she stumbled upon The Expanse (she’s only seen one season, the fourth), she really didn’t expect to read beyond Leviathan Wakes, but here she is.

She’s liking the split point of view more and more (At first, she found it annoying, she was impatient with the Miller sections in Leviathan Wakes and the Prax sections in Caliban’s War). In Abbadon’s Gate, there is not that much Holden (Self loves his point of view, always) but Clarissa/Melba’s gives her chills. And she didn’t expect the authors to use Bull’s at the point when the Behemoth (she only wishes they’d thought of a better name) enters the Ring, but here we are at p. 217, and the Bull point of view is very effective here:

They made the transit slowly, the thrust gravity hardly more than a tendency for things to drift toward the floor. Bull couldn’t say whether that was a technical decision on Sam’s part meant to keep them from moving too quickly in the uncanny reduced speed beyond the ring, or Ashford giving the Earth and Mars ships the time to catch up so that they’d all be passing through at more or less the same time. Only if it was that, it wouldn’t have been Ashford. That kind of diplomatic thinking was Pa’s.

Probably it was just that the main drive couldn’t go slow enough, and this was as fast as the maneuvering thrusters could move them.

Photo by stein egil liland on Pexels.com

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

The Ring: Abaddon’s Gate, p. 208

At the center of the spectral Ring is a station.

James Holden: “We’re calling it a station pretty much only because it sits at the center of the slow zone, and we’re making the entirely unfounded assumption that some sort of control station for the gates would be located there. The station has no visible breaks in its surface. Nothing that looks like an airlock, or an antenna, or a sensor array, or anything.”

Beyond the station is a “slow zone.”

Holden again: “… the most intriguing factor of the slow zone, and the one that give it its name, is the absolute speed limit of six hundred meters per second. Any object above the quantum level traveling faster than that is locked down by what seems to be an inertial dampening field, and then dragged off … ”

Think of the slow zone as a kind of garbage disposal, only GIANT. Super giant. Because it dragged away an entire spaceship called the Y Que. And the only reason the Rocinante made it through the zone was because Holden gave his pilot a nav package that specified a speed just below that of the Y Que’s. He’s pretty smart, and that is why she has no problem with his being the Captain of the Rocinante, even though not everyone may be enamored with his character.

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

Abaddon’s Gate, p. 174: Speechless With the Thrill of It All

Just so you know, self has yet to encounter an Abaddon in this installment.

And if you were waiting to meet a Caliban in Book # 2 of The Expanse, self is very sorry for you, because that installment was, like Book # 1, around 600 pages.

Anyhoo, why worry with who or what or why Abaddon is. The only thing you need to know is that Jim Holden is still the Captain of the Rocinante in Abaddon’s Gate, and with Alex (the best navigator and pilot in the entire solar system) still piloting the ship, high jinks of course ensue.

BRING IT ON!

p. 174:

• Holden sent the nav package to Alex, half expecting him to refuse. Hoping. Instead, the Roci accelerated for an endless twenty-seven minutes, followed by a nauseating zero-g spin that lasted less than four seconds, and a deceleration burn that lasted four and a half minutes and knocked every single person on the ship unconscious.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

 

 

#amreading: Rosebud 67, Spring 2020

Have You No Decency, Sir

A widower is requesting Twitter to remove Donald Trump’s tweets suggesting his wife was murdered by prominent Trump critic Joe Scarborough.

— Associated Press, 26 May 2020

“My request is simple: Please delete these tweets,” Timothy J. Klausutis wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The body of Lori Kaye Klausutis, 28, was found in Scarborough’s Fort Walton Beach, Florida, congressional office on July 20, 2001.

Klausutis said in the letter, sent last week, that his wife had an undiagnosed heart condition, fell and hit her head on her desk at work. He called her death “the single most painful thing that I have ever had to deal with” and said he feels a marital obligation to protect her memory amid “a constant barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, innuendo and conspiracy theories since the day she died.”

Klausitis said Trump is among the conspiracy theorists spreading “bile and misinformation” on Twitter “disparaging the memory” of his wife and their marriage. Trump’s tweets violate Twitter’s community rules and terms of service, he said.

“An ordinary user like me would be banished,” Klausitis wrote. In a statement, Twitter said it was “deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family.”

But the company did not say it would do anything about Trump’s tweets or mention them directly.

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

The Inexorable

Abaddon’s Gate, pp. 116 – 117:

• The flotilla was coming to the last leg of its journey. They had passed the orbit of Uranus weeks ago, and the sun was a bright star in an overwhelming abyss of night sky. All the plumes of fire were pointed toward the Ring now, bleeding off their velocity with every passing minute.

Self is enjoying Abaddon’s Gate so much more than Caliban’s War. She would rather have space travel and adventure than any other kind of reading, at the moment.

Stay safe, dear blog readers.

The Sea, Our Mother

Self has many thoughts about the sea because … well, she comes from one of the 7,100 islands of the Philippines.

When she visited Venice, some years back, she encountered the Maritime Museum (off San Marco Plaza), and first encountered the Venetian expression “married to the sea.”

In the writings about the sea, the sea is referred to as feminine. Also, mercurial.

Perhaps this is why she chose to write her novel. It’s about the sea, of course. And she’s been reading about seafarers ever since.

Two years ago, she was teaching in Mendocino. One of her favorite hangouts was Gallery Bookshop, corner of Albion and Kasten in Mendocino Village (the most fabulous bookstore, with its own resident cat). She found a book written by a retired US Admiral.

She just started reading it (thank you, Corona Virus). Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans

The Introductory Chapter is called The Sea Is One:

It is worth remembering that each of us is, essentially, largely made of water. When a human baby is born, it is composed of roughly 70 percent water. It has always fascinated me that roughly the same proportion of the globe is covered by water — just over 70 percent. Both our planet and our bodies are dominated by the liquid world, and anyone who has sailed extensively at sea will understand instinctively the primordial tug of the oceans upon each of us when we look upon the sea.

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #98: Delicate Colors

As many countries are opening up a bit from lock-down, and I was inspired by the soft glory of spring nature in my part of the world, I thought we would indulge in some Delicate Colours! They are everywhere in nature, but also to be found anywhere you look, in for example fashion, art and architecture. — Leya

Self is always happy to participate in a Photo Challenge. Anything to distract from Shelter-in-Place, entering the third month here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

First: HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY!

To everyone who has a loved one in this fight, or has lost a loved one, blessings.

Hydrangeas on Front Porch: May 2020

Iceberg Roses in Front Yard, May 2020

Looking at the Garden from the Kitchen Window, 24 May 2020. The curtains were from World Market, which has since closed.

Look at these beautiful galleries:

• Sofia Alves
• My Blog – solaner
• simply beautiful . . .
• lifelessons
• Travels and Trifles
• Don’t hold your breath
• David M’s photoblog

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

The Generation Ship Nauvoo

Abaddon’s Gate, p. 53:

He passed through the transfer station and down towards his office. The rooms and corridors here were all built aslant, waiting for the spin gravity that would never come.

Must take a moment to thank the authors for giving ships names like Rocinante, the Somnambulist, and the Y Que. Even Nauvoo has something inexplicably romantic about it.

Unfortunately, the Nauvoo is re-named the Behemoth. And there’s nothing romantic about that.

What’s in a ship’s name? Something very, very important. Millenium Falcon is a dud. The Nostromo is fabulous.

Self is not above borrowing for her ship’s names: Kobayashi Maru (thank you, Star Trek training exercise) and Mohenjo Daro.

Self’s great-grandfather wrote for an underground newspaper in Manila. He used a pen name: Ang Kiukok.

In her next science fiction story, she’ll use Ang Kiukok as the name for a very wee ship. A racer, maybe. She’ll connect the two words and name her ship Angkiukok.

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

Abaddon’s Gate (Book #3 of The Expanse), p. 13

Last night, she read the last page of Hidden Valley Road, and was so moved. The family imploded, the strain was too much. But running through it all was the indomitable will of three women: the mother who produced six schizophrenic sons, the youngest daughter who endured sexual abuse, and the scientist who studied schizophrenia and kept such meticulous notes that even when her study was shelved, another set of researchers found her observations invaluable. It was such a perfect ending. Self cried!

Self is back to reading about the adventures of Jim Holden and his plucky crew. Must say, it was a relief to be back with the familiar characters of The Expanse. She can now see the absolute value of a fiction series. You get vested in the characters, of course you do. Even though she didn’t admire Caliban’s War as much as Leviathan Wakes, it had a truly thrilling back half.

Anyhoo, this installment begins with a jaw-dropping action prologue (of course) before re-uniting us with the crew of the Rocinante:

Amos had spent thirty grand during a stopover on Callisto, buying them some after-market engine upgrades. When Holden pointed out that the Roci was already capable of accelerating fast enough to kill her crew and asked why they’d need to upgrade her, Amos had replied, “Because this shit is awesome.”

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.