I am not a Civil War buff. I’m a history buff, but not a Civil War buff. I know the general outlines of the war, and how the Union generals in the East were a sorry bunch for much of the war, and like that; but I confess I haven’t studied it. Consequently, I’d never seriously considered reading The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara until Julie and Scott picked it for their A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast. I’ve not listened to the podcast, mind you; but I thought, well, I’ll give it a try.

And frankly, it’s nothing short of amazing.

The Killer Angels is simply the story of the Battle of Gettysburg, the turning point of the entire war. Shaara’s primary viewpoint characters are General Longstreet, Robert E. Lee’s right-hand man after the death of Stonewall Jackson, and Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, an infantry commander from Maine. There are also scattered chapters from the points of view of Lee himself and a few others. Shaara digs deep into these characters; they, and their companions in arms, are as well and finely drawn as any I can think of. And, I gather, Shaara is exceedingly accurate. Gettysburg, and the Civil War in general, is one of the best documented wars in history. All the well-known survivors wrote about it, and many of the less well-known, and I can’t help thinking that Shaara picked his viewpoint characters based entirely on the material available. (Signficantly, I don’t believe anyone who died in the battle is used as a viewpoint character.)

I was especially impressed by Joshua Chamberlain. A college professor from Bowdoin University, he somehow ended up a Colonel…and to his surprise, found that he was remarkably good at it. He ended the war a Major General, and because of his accomplishments was honored by being chosen to receive Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Later he became Governor of Maine, and President of Bowdoin University.

Anyway. Highly recommended.

Indentured is a short science fiction tale by Scott McElhaney, the first book in a series called The Mystic Saga. I found it on Amazon’s Kindle store after buying Nathan Lowell’s Quarter Share; it was highly rated, and inexpensive, and so I decided to give it a try.

I do not plan to read the remaining books in the series.

First, a little about the book; and then some general remarks about the current state of the publishing world, and e-book publishing in particular.

Declan Singletree is injured during a vigilante raid on some big guys in the illegal drug business. He’s given an MRI. And the next thing he knows, he’s on board a starship, apparently en route to a colony planet where he’s going to be one of the first responders. Thing is, he’s not quite himself. According to what he was told, his MRI was recorded, and the recording was saved, and in order to come up with a quick supply of indentured servants the people behind the colony ship impressed his MRI records on a force grown clone, thus giving it his personality. He, of course, rebels, and looks for support.

Now, the MRI thing is absurd on the face of it. I do not believe that it will ever be possible to record personality in any electronic form; but certainly not as a standard MRI. If the author had done a little more work—that is, if he’d made something up, if he had told me that it was an Ultra-High-Resolution Rhodo-Magnetic Resonance Imager, based on fancy new technology, I might have bought it. C’mon, show some imagination!

The story doesn’t get any better from there. It seems that the sexy nurse who was kind to him in the hospital also had an MRI shortly after his, and a clone based on her recording is on the same ship. Declan is given four devices, which he’s to give to the nurse’s clone and other people he trusts to help in a rebellion. He immediately gives one of them to another clone whose only recommendation is that he’s too stupid to keep his head down while working against the authorities. In fact, stupidity is the rule of the day.

So, color me unimpressed.

Now, I know that the big thing in publishing is for new authors to bypass the traditional publishers by going straight to the e-book market with low prices: $0.99 to $4.99. I’m in favor of that, especially given that the publishers have largely abrogated their responsibilities with regard to editing and publicity anyway. However, it also means that you need to wade knee-deep through a lot of dreck in order to find the good stuff.

So I buy this book, which somehow has gotten four stars at Amazon (53 reviews), and it was a waste of my time.

At the risk of sounding like the lady who said, “The food here is awful—and the portions are so small!” I’ve got another complaint. Now, the book was $0.99; not a lot. But it was also remarkably short. In Kindle format, it’s maximum location is 1475. By comparison, Quarter Share, which is also very short, has a max location of 3167. The Alchemyst, a not terribly long juvenile by Michael Scott, has a max location of 4830. Jane Eyre clocks in at 8649.

In short, Indentured is a short story masquerading as a novel. And that brings me to a general problem with e-books in general.

When you’re looking at books at the bookstore, you can see immediately how thick the book is. Granted, it might have large print; it might have small print; it’s often worthwhile to check. But you can get an immediate notion of how much book you’re buying, without even thinking about it. That doesn’t happen when you’re looking at a book on Amazon. Amazon does tell you the “Print Length”, 94 pages in this case, if you go looking for that (and I will, from now on, when dealing with books by unknown authors)—but it’s not obvious. It should be.

And in this particular case, I hope I can be forgiven for thinking that the author is trying to take advantage of the $0.99 trend by breaking a full-sized novel up into surprisingly small $0.99 chunks, instead of simply giving me a decent piece of work at a decent price. (I’d not quite so put out if I hadn’t read a number of full-sized novels at $0.99.) I’d much rather he give me the whole thing at $3.99 or $5.99 than try to fool me like this.

I’ve been reading Nathan Lowell’s Solar Clipper Traders series, which begins with Quarter Share. The books concern one Ishmael Wang, who at 18 finds himself parentless, friendless, and most importantly, jobless, on a company world. The company doesn’t want him, and he’s got to get off-planet PDQ. He can join the marines; or he can find a berth on a freighter plying its way from star to star. To make a short story shorter, he does the latter and becomes the most junior crew-member of the Solar Clipper Lois McKendrick. The “quarter share” of the title is Ishmael’s share of the profits from any voyage; by tradition, the owner gets 20%, the captain gets 10%, and the remaining crew split up the rest by shares: quarter, full, half, or double. The books in the series are named according to these shares, up to Owner’s Share (not yet released), and so I imagine that the rags to riches story continues until our hero is independently wealthy.

I’ve read the first four books in the series, and I’ve rather enjoyed them. They are light, pleasant, short, mostly frothy, and entertaining. There’s a fair amount of sex, but though (apparently) steamy it’s mostly non-graphic. On the other hand, the books are completely, utterly, totally absurd.

Some books are absurd because they are meant to be. Some books are absurd because the author has people behaving in ways that people just don’t behave, and this is one of those…and you knew I just had to talk about it.

Our hero, Ishmael, is the son of a university professor, a teacher of “ancient literature” (hence his name). He apparently has managed to get to 18 without having any real friends. He has no idea what he wants to do with his life. He’s wicked smart. Almost anything he wants to pick up, he picks up absurdly easily. He’s embarassingly decent, kind, cheerful, friendly, helpful. He discovers that he’s amazingly good-looking and sexy. All of the women he knows want to have sex with him. All of the men like him, except for a very few who are bad, evil, misogynistic monsters (and they don’t show up until the fourth book). He’s naturally good at finding trade goods, at trouble-shooting problems, and at saving the ship and its crew. He’s the kind of guy who will pitch in to help with the dirty jobs, even when they aren’t in his department. Despite never having had any friends until he boards the Lois McKendrick, he is never at a loss for a word, always knows what to say, and can charm the pants off of the ladies (literally) when he tries to.

Frankly, his humble awesomeness does get a little wearing after a while. He’s simply too damned good. (Ladies tell him, “You’re damned good,” until it becomes a joke.)

Which brings me to the “fraternization policy” of the Lois McKendrick, and, we gather, the majority of trading ships: “you don’t screw crew.” In some ships, open fraternization is allowed, and the pretty girls are known as “bunk-bunnies”. But this leads to friction, hurt feelings, and other relationship problems when you’re in flight for three months between ports, and so most ships don’t allow it. You don’t have sex with your crewmembers on ship or in port. You just don’t.

This is the source of what drama there is in the second book, Half Share. There are three ladies in particular on the Lois McKendrick who are extremely fond of Ish, and very attracted to him; but it’s just part of a spacer’s life that you can’t have sex with the one you’re with and that you like, and you have to have sex, and so when you make port you go and find someone else. These three ladies, all of whom are drooling for him, go out of their way to make sure that he’s able to get some. They aren’t jealous, but they are all a little sad because they can’t have what they want. It’s the tragedy of the spacer’s life.

Now, you’d think that if sex between crew-members was forbidden, the ship might be organized to reduce temptation. But no. All berthing areas are co-ed, and there’s all manner of ogling, innuendo, and so forth. And yet somehow the taboo against sex between crew-members is so engrained that it just simply never happens. Never.

I’m reminded of H.M.S. Pinafore:

“What, never?”
“No, never!”
“What, never????”
“Well, hardly ever!!!!”

They’ve got things set up to make it as hard as possible to stick to the rules…and yet everyone does, without fail. I’m not buying it.

(To be fair, there are small, family run trading ships as well, where a saner kind of interaction between the sexes seems to prevail…but that’s not where Ish is working.)

So the books are absurdly beholden to the zeitgeist. Still, they’re fun: good beach reading.