{"id":184,"date":"2003-08-08T04:51:00","date_gmt":"2003-08-08T04:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=184"},"modified":"2018-08-03T09:56:35","modified_gmt":"2018-08-03T14:56:35","slug":"184","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2003\/08\/08\/184\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: <i>Deathstar Voyage<\/i> by Ian Wallace"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While researching for my <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2003\/08\/05\/172\/\" target=\"new\">last book review<\/a>, a non-fiction book, I discovered some <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B009IHH04K\/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&#038;camp=1789&#038;creative=9325&#038;creativeASIN=B009IHH04K&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;tag=stlbrianj-20&#038;linkId=963d2515c043aeade692962398b4b6da\" target=\"new\">Amazon retailers<\/a> were selling (I mean, trying to sell) the fiction book I was reading in tandem with the nonfiction book I reviewed for outlandish sums of money.  This fact piqued my interest in the fiction book; also, I discovered it was the beginning of a series.  So I paid more attention to it and chewed my way through the first couple of chapters.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the research reminded me of the subtitle and genre, so I could grasp it&#8217;s a mystery in space.  A Galactic detective, the series character Claudine St. Cyr, is guarding a planetary monarch from assassins, when suddenly the ship&#8217;s in danger of going nova and then the captain and subsequent acting captains start dropping of hearts that are inverted en media chest.<\/p>\n<p>Once I got through those first few chapters, I started recognizing that rabbits were going to come out of hats, caps, sweaters, suit jackets, and many other items of apparel, and a whole pantheon of deus ex maquinas were at work here.  Understanding this, I could more easily read the book.  It wasn&#8217;t as though I <i>missed<\/i> some information, it&#8217;s that it just wasn&#8217;t there before it was relevant.  Subtle things, like <i>psychokinesis would make a good a murder weapon<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>But it&#8217;s a quick read, and a junk read, and an interesting time capsule of the female protagonist written by a male author in 1969.  Claudine St. Cyr is beautiful, intelligent, dutiful, and somehow every named male character in this book wants to <b><i>marry<\/i><\/b> her, and most of the major characters propose marriage to her in the 170 pages.  But she remains chaste, although tempted to kiss on several occasions.  A sixties male character in this situation, say an interstellar Mike Hammer, would have Kirked every carbon-based female (or nongendered) life form, would have shot one or more of them later, and would have set the ship to supernova himself to make a point.<\/p>\n<p>So what&#8217;s my point?  <i>I will read anything<\/i>, I think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While researching for my last book review, a non-fiction book, I discovered some Amazon retailers were selling (I mean, trying to sell) the fiction book I was reading in tandem with the nonfiction book I reviewed for outlandish sums of money. This fact piqued my interest in the fiction book; also, I discovered it was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21598,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions\/21598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}