Warning, I will mostly try to limit spoilers to things you could learn from reading the book descriptions below on Amazon, but if you are really interested in experiencing the Merchant Princes series, the Dark Tower series, or Star Trek Discovery with no prior inkling of what they are about, maybe avoid this post.
I haven’t made a summer reading post yet in 2021. And Donald Rumsfeld passed away this week. How are these two things related? Well, it seems that my summer reading theme for this year has settled on parallel universes. This happened somewhat by accident. A year or more ago, I ran out of books in Charlie Stross’s Laundry Files series and turned to his Merchant Princes series without really knowing what it was about. I’m going to try to avoid spoilers in this post, so let’s just say it involves parallel universes along with stealth lessons on economics and the history of technological progress. It’s also about a Game of Thrones-esque medieval succession crisis, nuclear terrorism, and how the United States government might (over)react to an incident of nuclear terrorism. Which is where Donald Rumsfeld comes in. And I’ll leave it at that, having already said too much. I never get quite into the characters or plots in this series as much as I did the Laundry Files, but I’m still enjoying.
In my mind, the real Rumsfeld in our universe gets a lot of credit for the Iraq weapons of mass destruction lie, the Iraq invasion, and Guantanamo Bay, and more generally civilian deaths and mistreatment of prisoners of war. And almost all of it was by choice rather than necessity. What I didn’t remember, but was reminded of by this Intercept article, was his central role in the “Plan B” assessment in the 70s that produced alternative facts (aka lies) about Soviet nuclear capability and led to the huge arms buildup of the 1980s. So in my book he had a lot of blood on his hands, and took foolish risks that could have led to unimaginable consequences. I find it hard to mourn his passing.
Anyway back to happier topics in bloodless fictional universes like Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Ha ha, did I say bloodless? This is Stephen King we’re talking about. I read The Stand during the 2020 Covid-19 shut down, then moved on to this for this summer. In a forward to The Stand, Stephen King talks about how he originally intended The Stand to be a sort of Lord of the Rings set in the American west. The Stand turned out to be something different, and this turns out to be more like what The Stand was meant to be early on. There’s a tower and an eye, for chrissakes. It’s pretty awesome – a wild mashup of Lord of the Rings, Clint Eastwood movies (I’m listening to the audiobook and the narrator uses a spot-on Clint Eastwood impression throughout), King Arthur, Roger Zelasny’s Amber series (which is also evident in the Merchant Princes series, but I would say more evident here), Brothers Grimm (and/or its Disney variants), the Wizard of Oz, King’s own work, and I am sure thousands of other things I am not picking up on. Like at one point, we meet a crouching tiger and a hidden dragon just a few pages apart. It might not hold together if it was written by someone other than Stephen King, but hey…
Did I mention Star Trek Discovery above? I like Star Trek – it’s a little nerdy, a little campy, the acting is not always excellent, and it’s just relaxing and fun and you don’t have to think too hard. Well, this turned out to be less campy, better acted, and more fun than I expected. There’s some martial arts action from Michelle Yeoh, who starred in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000, and is now 58 years old. And there is a parallel universe angle, which I wasn’t expecting, and just slotted it right into place with my summer theme.
I’m going to run out of Merchant Princes most likely, so I might read another Amber novel. I don’t love Amber actually, but it’s just canonical so I plan to work my way through it little by little. After Labor Day, I’ll return to my usual alternating of fiction and non-fiction, and generally slower reading pace.