Short Reviews for February 2025

This Alien Shore, Day of the Dragonstar, Rome at War, The Politics of Revelation and Reason

This Alien Shore, by C. S. Friedman (565 pp; 1998)

Who should read this? People who like good sci-fi worldbuilding and twist-filled plots.

Friedman has made an excellently deep universe for her sci-fi novel. It feels not just lived-in, but like its history is rich enough to easily have another dozen stories. But instead, the backstory is gradually - not even just revealed, but dropped in over the course of the novel, points that're tangentially relevent as well as directly. Many parts of this book are good, but I thought that was the best!

The plot is about a young woman whose tutors have given her special brain implants to... she doesn't know what, but something special enough that someone blows up her orbital habitat to try to kidnap her. So she flees from Earth's orbit to the other worlds which have historically-rooted tensions with Earth, and into the arms of the pilots' guild which is amid dealing with a virus in their brain implants. It's very well plotted, with twists throughout, and the tension holding from early on through the end.

Another thing that stood out is how this's the best job I've seen of painting a picture of computer programming and hacking. She never explains how the visual images she uses represent computer code - but in a world where almost all coding is done through the brain implants, I can readily imagine it's been standardized this way.

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Day of the Dragonstar, by David Bischoff (291 pp; 1983)

Who should read this? People who're ready to read anything with intelligent dinos.

Somehow, Bischoff manages to write about a generation-ship spaceship of intelligent dinosaurs and make it boring.

He does this by telling a story about the humans discovering the ship, not the dinos themselves. We don't see the intelligent dinos until halfway through the book, and we barely get a good view of them even after that. There's only one dino character who's at all multidimensional, and only a couple more who even have named speaking parts.

Instead, the dinos are backdrop to a story about human political tensions around the discovery of this generation ship, with brinkmanship between different nations and spies and saboteurs in the American ship that first docks with the dino ship... but an even more tiresome plotline, to me, was the romantic entanglements of the astronaut crew.

I didn't want the story I got. I wanted the dinos.

There's potential here in Bischoff's worldbuilding... but only slight potential. He even partly averts the thrilling idea of a dino generation ship: he has it built not by the dinos themselves, but by ancient aliens who (in the distant past) guided the evolution of the dinos into sapience. I expect these aliens will actually show up in the next two books in the series (which I have no plans to read), but as yet they're vague and much less interesting than the dinos, even the dinos whom Bischoff has robbed of much of their potential by making them mere passengers on this self-piloted ship.

Often, I say a world I've read about deserves a better book. Here, I say the premise deserves better development.

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Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic, by Nathan Rosenstein (339 pp; 2004)

Who should read this? People who really want to dig into the history of the Roman Republic and life during it.

According to the popular view, upper-class Romans in the Middle Republic used the wealth from conquests to buy out small farmers whose land had been ruined by being away on long campaigns, which led to the mass of landless Romans that supported the Gracchi and later imperiled the Republic.

Rosenstein disputes this, with evidence. He shows that even previously, legionaries were not able to return to their farms for planting or harvest; and therefore legionaries were conscripted from younger men who weren't married and didn't own their own farms. Also, the size of privately-owned farms did not diminish over this era. He instead traces the change to more legionaries dying during Hannibal's invasion, leading to population growth afterwards which then overshot the carrying capacity of the land.

I don't have the background to evaluate any of this for myself, but he does have a convincing argument. Also, I enjoyed this detailed picture of the life of a Roman Republican farm family, and how sociological trends play into each other.

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The Politics of Revelation and Reason: Religion and Civic Life in the New Nation, by John G West, Jr. (320 pp; 1996)

Who should read this? People who want an introduction to specific Founding Fathers and religion; or people who want an overview of religiously-motivated political campaigns in early America.

There're two parts to this.

First, West lines up dozens of Founding Fathers to look into how they saw the role of religion in the new Republic. This was interesting at the start, though the repetition felt sort of boring and repetitive before it was over - but on the other hand, I can see why he wanted to be comprehensive. Each individual sketch is about as good as can be expected in the page or two given to it, but that's still just a brief sketch - he's trying to do a lot quickly here, in a short page count.

Second, and more interestingly, West looks into three comparatively-nonpartisan religious efforts to influence the government: the campaign against dueling (which succeeded), the campaign against opening post offices on Sundays (which failed before eventually coming back and succeeding much later after telephones made the mail less urgent), and the campaign against Cherokee removal (which also failed).

West's descriptions were very good, but his analysis simplistic. I would have liked more analysis. He could've compared the different Founding Fathers' views, rather than just listing them. He could have looked into why Christians chose as they did in these efforts, rather than just describing it. Finally, he could have tried to explain why the Sunday mails and Cherokee campaigns failed - and what that meant for Christian influence in America. I'm left wondering on all of these points, and wishing for answers - not least because of the implications they could possibly have for Christianity in modern America.