The Mistborn Trilogy: Books 2 and 3 by Brandon Sanderson

From The Week of March 19, 2012

In any discussion about the problems of power, its abuse is invariably the first point raised. For abuse of power is not only often obvious and blatant, it is easily agitated against given that most of us imagine ourselves above such failings. We believe that we possess the strength of character to avoid temptation. However, there's arguably a more pervasive problem with power; its use in general.

Like a boulder plunged into a pond, the deployment of power, no matter how good-intentioned, creates a ripple effect which sets into motion consequences the actor never intended, much less envisioned. In other words, just as much harm can come from doing good as doing ill, provided that the doer of good has not carefully considered his actions. This nuanced and important lesson pervades the final two instalments of the exciting if long-winded Mistborn Trilogy. It is a lesson learned much to the cost of its characters.

In The Well of Ascension, the trilogy's second volume, two years have elapsed since the death of the Lord Ruler, the iron-fisted demigod who used violence and death to maintain peace in his ash-laden realm. But instead of the peace and harmony anticipated by his overthrowers, the Lord Ruler's fall has created chaos in the Final Empire. Predicated on a strict, authoritarian hierarchy, the imperium, in place for a thousand years, is, without its godhead, a crumbling edifice, the continuing deterioration of which has overwhelmed the efforts of the rebels to bring about the changes their insurgency promised. Despite their best efforts to institute a constitutional monarchy, injustice, rebellion and destitution abound. For such a harsh and omnipotent state cannot be so easily swept away. And in the meantime, without the harsh but ubiquitous agents of the Lord Ruler to keep the state running, anarchy and confusion are the immediate results of Kelsier's revolution.

But hope remains. If Vin, the one-time street urchin turned hero, can find the Well of Ascension, a fabled but ultimately mysterious source of power, perhaps the land can be saved from the increasingly burdensome heaps of ash that are destroying what remains of the Final Empire's cropland. Perhaps it can be a demonstration of the good that the new regime intends to bring to the people. Perhaps it can save a dying world from its apparently inevitable collapse. Of course, such legends have a habit of being too good to be true.

In The Hero of Ages, which flows on directly from The Well of Ascension, the apocalypse has truly drawn nigh. Since the Lord Ruler's death, the everpresent mists, which have characterized the land for a thousand years, have grown bolder, consuming those brave souls who dare to venture into its nighttime embrace. Many return from the mists, but some are changed in ways they cannot understand. Might the mists have a purpose? Might they too be an enemy of the beleaguered people of the Final Empire? Or is this just another sign that all things are moving towards a final, climactic confrontation between the forces of creation and destruction?

While the Final Empire's new regime scrambles to extend its protection to the most far flung regions of the kingdom, a new power is on the loose, a power that seeks to fulfil an ancient bargain, a power that wants nothing more than to bury in ash those stubborn humans who've refused to go down with their empire. It's all too much for the band of one-time rebels. Attacked on all fronts, by nightmares, by gods, by the very environment that once sheltered them, events are overtaking them, backing them into a corner from which there is no escape. Ruin will have his day. But for the slim hopes of an ancient prophecy, doom is certain.

Though they lack the excitement and originality of The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension and The Hero of Ages bring the Mistborn Trilogy to a satisfying and apocalyptic conclusion. To replace the rebellious, conspiratorial energy that electrified the first volume, Mr. Sanderson taps into that most existential of human fears, the end of the world, riding this nihilistic wave to a most pleasing if cartoonish conclusion. Throughout, the author has demonstrated a consistent capacity to evolve his characters. More importantly, he allows them to err, to be fooled, to act wrongly, selfishly. In other words, to act human. And it is this humanity which helps to counteract Mr. Sanderson's tendency to rely too heavily on cliche.

The plot here leaves room for both praise and criticism. The former stems from Mr. Sanderson's courageous willingness to dig deeply into his themes. Throughout, while his heroes stereotypically bttle against overwhelming odds, he unflinchingly deconstructs the origins and the utility of religion, truth, destiny and power. His is not the only work of fantasy to raise such complex subjects, but the extent to which he treats them with the gravitas they deserve elevates Mistborn well above the crowd.

The latter stems from numerous sources. The author's over-reliance on Deus Ex Machina is troubling. For a series based on the notions of personal choice, Mistborn's conclusion smacks far too much of predetermination for comfort. More over, Mr. Sanderson's decision, to use epitaphs to relate the exposition of his mythology proves to be tiresome. The technique has some initial charm, but it eventually suggests an inability to gradually reveal the backstory through conventional methods, such as having the characters discover fundamental truths on their own. Worse yet, Mr. Sanderson does a poor job concealing his reveals. This wouldn't be a problem if the author's intent wasn't so clearly to shock and amaze his readers with clever twists at the key moments of the series. Poorly concealing the fates and roles of his characters ensures that the attentive reader is both unsurprised and unexcited by Mistborn's primary revelations.

Notwithstanding its warts, Mistborn is an entertaining trilogy with a vivid world, an imaginative magic system, an interesting mythology and compelling characters. The extent to which the author reveals his hand too early can be forgiven when the rewards are so rich. The most pleasing of these is the series' main character. Vin is a wonderful heroine, a battered angel with broken wings. Her story, along with the author's capacity to express her humanity, her doubts in the face of her superhuman nature, causes her to stand out amongst a sea of similar creations. The series, for all its virtues, would have collapsed under its own portentous weight without Vin's sardonic energy.

A worthy and memorable conclusion to what The Final Empire so magnificently launched. (3/5 Stars)

On Monsters by Stephen T. Asma

From The Week of March 19, 2012

For all of humanity's strengths, for all that we've conquered countless frontiers of thought on our way to earthly preeminence, we remain a species driven by fear. Hundreds of phobias have been documented, ranging from the mundane to the strange, from the mild to the cripplingly severe, but it may be that none of them can compete with our fear of the unknown. This terror is so vast, so all-consuming, that it has lead us to fabricate entire belief systems just to have some sort of order to explain the chaos. We need stability. We need the world around us to make sense. For when it doesn't, we flail for answers we cannot find. Mr. Asma has assembled, here, a wonderful catalogue of humanity's monsters, but it is this fear of the unknown that empowers them to haunt our imaginations.

From misfits to mythology, from demons to the deranged, On Monsters is a tour through the museum of humanity's mental and physical nightmares. Frankensteins and beast men appear alongside zombies and land-bound octopi in this gallery of the grotesque and the devilish, the real and the imagined. The steady progress of science has de-fanged most of these monsters, reducing them to little more than the products of twisted imaginations, but why did we invent them in the first place? What lead otherwise perfectly rational men and women to put their names to first-hand accounts of such deformities when they clearly belong to the realm of the fanciful? Fear and ignorance... The former, revulsion for the unknown, the impure, the apocalyptic, the theological, gave them form, human imaginings based on elements of nature and animated by our disgust. The latter, blindness to the truths of the world, of evolution, of the nature of life, allowed them to persist until scientific advances sucked these creatures back into the pages of myth and story. This virtually guarantees that monsters will always be with us. After all, until science can explain the universe, there will always be room for monsters.

Disturbing and enlightening, On Monsters is an engrossing journey through man's twisted psyche. Mr. Asma, a professor of philosophy, puts our gremlins under the microscope, examining not only the fears that went into their creation but the purposes their existences served. Pleasingly scientific, he relies on reason and research to explain the origins and popularity of the fanciful and the actual. For the author is most revelatory when he connects our nightmares back to the actual creatures that gave rise to them, things so brutally purposeful that they put to rest, for good, any notion that Nature is kind or gentle.

A fascinating read, as much for the history lesson in monsters as for the stroll through the human imagination and the lengths to which it will go to layer logic atop the inexplicable. What's more, Mr. Asma's avoidance of a lecturing tone allows the reader to join him in his exploration of the root causes for our monsters. This invitation should be taken up by anyone even mildly curious about how the mind works and fears. For here lie those forces that spawn prejudice and racism, us and them, good and evil. A better understanding of such forces is bound to make us wiser souls. (4/5 Stars)

Afghanistan by Stephen Tanner

From The Week of March 19, 2012

While our fortunes are shaped by many factors, our parents, our nations, our eras, it may well be that the most pivotal force, in the determining of our destinies, is geography. For not only have exploitable land and natural resources, separately and together, altered the futures of nations and empires, forbidding mountains and impassable oceans have protected and nourished cultures that, otherwise, would have been long-since absorbed by more powerful societies. However, as much as these natural barriers can shield populations from assimilation, they can also invite attention by those rapacious greats of history who see only challenge in the unconquerable. And wherever there is conquest, ruin is not far afield. No country has ever labored more beneath the curse of geography, than Afghanistan. Mr. Tanner explains in this, his military history of that battered country.

Sprawled at the intersection of empires and continents, tribes and civilizations, lies Afghanistan. For thousands of years, this country of mountains and deserts has been the fascination of warriors and scholars, the former having tried with some success to conquer it; the latter having tried in vain to understand it. For Afghanistan, which has crouched between east and west for centuries, is an inexplicable blend of past and future. It is a country of cities and tribes, of cultured merchants and horse-born nomads. In any other land, such divisions would have been forced to amalgamate, to be normalized by the inevitable blending of cultural elements that occurs any time people are forced to comingle. However, Afghanistan's geography shortcircuited this process, allowing the tribes to live and survive in the mountains while, below, the citydwellers moved on, their fortunes rising and falling with the succession of kings and warlords, emperors and high priests, who, over millennia, have laid claim to this most vital and rocky roadway between Europe and Asia.

From Alexander the Great to Chandragupta Maurya, from the British empire to the Soviet Union, Mr. Tanner recounts Afghanistan's long and bloody history with armies and imperiums. He describes how these experiences imprinted upon the people of Afghanistan both the Way of the Warrior and the will of the resister, values that, along with the country's challenging geography, has kept it from cohering into a stable, united society. The absence of this national identity has bestowed upon Afghanistan a terrible legacy of chaos, the misery of which has only been added to by arrogant empires who sought to subdue through force a world they barely bothered to understand.

Though Afghanistan is not without flaws, it is, in the main, an excellent primer on the history of this cursed country. From the Mauryans to the Mongols, Mr. Tanner, a military historian, bombards the reader with a dizzying array of empires that have trampled and besieged this diverse land. In the process, he introduces us to the great men of history, the savage and the enlightened, who've driven their standards down into Afghanistan's hard soil. But as illuminating as the author makes this long and winding journey, he sheds very little light at all on the Afghanis themselves, their customs, their treasures. This may not be the fault of the author. An absence of written records for much of the country's history surely does not aid in a fulsome portrait of Afghanistan. More over, the works' core revelation, that Afghanistan is little more than a collection of disparate fragments which have been so long left in pieces that they can no longer fit together, raises the question of which culture, the city or the tribal, should be expanded upon. Nonetheless, the absence of cultural information leaves the work, at times, to read like little more than a succession of battles, the details of which eventually blur into a haze of bloodshed and suffering.

For all its handicaps, Afghanistan is revelatory work that leaves little doubt that this fractured place will continue to be a troubled country. Published in 2002, the author concludes his history on the positive tone created by the NATO defeat of the Taliban. However, we know better. For we have had the benefit of watching those early gains recede in the face of Talibani truculence which, ironically, only underscores Mr. Tanner's overall portrait of an Afghanistan divided, an Afghanistan burdened by countless invasions, an Afghanistan without a national identity in an era of nation states. Much to the cost of the Afghani people, this portrait leaves little doubt that this country will continue to be what it has always been, the road over which great civilizations destructively churn. (3/5 Stars)

Mistborn - The Final Empire: Mistborn 01 by Brandon Sanderson

From The Week of March 12, 2012

Despotism is a pernicious force. It institutionalizes corruption, stifles innovation, imposes a strict hierarchy upon society, and hardens the hearts of the powerful to the plights of the powerless. That it does all this, and more, ought to ensure its destruction, for what society could long endure such decrepitude? What people, cognizant of the bleakness of their lives, would not act to bring down the regime and replace it with something better?

Despotism flourishes, not because it's logical, not because it's reasonable. It endures because it pedals fear and terror, emotions that eat away at the courage necessary for unity, for rebellion. But what happens when despotism goes too far? What happens when it leaves the beleaguered with nothing left to lose? Well, then it has a fight on its hands, a fight to the death. Welcome to Mr. Sanderson's apocalyptic Final Empire.

In a world of metal and ash, of smoke and fire, of red skies and fiery pits, the Final Empire churns painfully onward. Founded a thousand years earlier by the Lord Ruler, a shadowy, immortal presence that hangs over the realm like an oppressive cloud, the empire ostensibly exists for the betterment of mankind, bringing order, stability and freedom to a world once threatened by the mysterious Deepness. However, in reality, it is a corrupt aristocracy in which the nobility rule at the expense of the Skaa, a filthy, downtrodden people made obedient and docile by centuries of systematic slavery and abuse.

Transformed through personal tragedy from an arrogant fop into the leader of a Skaa rebellion, Kelsier is Mistborn, a mighty mystic who draws power from burning small amounts of various metals consumed both in powderized and solid forms. Rare among the nobility, Mistborn are second in power only to the Inquisitors, the strange, eyeless enforcers of the Lord Ruler's dictatorship. And so, when Kelsier stumbles across Vin, a beaten and battered girl thief, and discovers that she, like him, is mistborn, he eagerly takes her under his wing and watches as she blossoms from a skittish, suspicious urchin into a powerful force within his insurgent conspiracy. For something must be done to topple the Lord Ruler. Something must be done to bring sunlight and grass, fresh air and green plants, back into this world of mist and fire. A thousand years of servitude is long enough.

Having spent the last ten years establishing himself as one of the most prolific authors in the fantasy genre, Mr. Sanderson is a gifted builder of worlds. The Final Empire is a poignantly brutal place, a world reminiscent of an outer circle of Hell. Not a single page passes without leaving the reader with the impression of it having been smeared by soot. We, like Mr. Sanderson's characters, are given no respite from the ash-filled clouds, no opportunity to draw a breath of clean air from the misty, smoggy atmosphere. It's a credit to the author's skill that this feels far more evocative than oppressive. More over, the author has assembled an exciting, alchemical system of magic which is both pleasingly logical and behaviorally governed by physical laws. Yes, it is overly simplistic, and the heady reader will be able to grasp the implications and applications of the various metals far in advance of the story's characters, but this is a minor quibble in what is otherwise the most rewarding magical system since Weaving.

Though he lacks Martin's poetry of language and Jordan's depth of character, Mr. Sanderson's simplistic prose is only a minor hindrance to an excellent plot which sends the reader hurtling towards the climax of a wonderful yarn. Entertainment is, after all, the object of the whole endeavor. And, with a good sense of comedy and pathos, wistfulness and vengeance, the author has done that in spades. This is a slice of what life would be like in a world where the bad guys won. But though, in this, it is reminiscent of Karen Miller, it nonetheless cherishes its essential goodness.

Quality work. (4/5 Stars)

Prince Of Thorns: The Broken Empire 01 by Mark Lawrence

From The Week of March 12, 2012

Revenge is a powerful emotion. It can sustain us through the darkest moments, burning away all of our secondary concerns to leave a hardened core of vengeful purpose. But for all of revenge's potence, it is ultimately a corrupting and abrasive emotion, the use of which erodes both morals and personality. For in time, even the hardened core must inevitably give way and then what is there left but a grim, purposeless void, an emptiness that can never be filled up by light. This is the enduring and oppressive lesson of Prince of Thorns, Mr. Lawrence's first and uneven novel.

In a world riven by war and rivalry, life labors onward in the Broken Empire. A once united whole that gathered up everyone from the knights down to the peasantry, the empire has since shattered into a hundred fragments, fiefdoms ruled by warlords who masquerade as nobility. Titles that once denoted honor and chivalric service are now merely pretty decorations to distract from the awful truth that there is very little of actual nobility anywhere in this realm, let alone in its landed classes.

Deeply scarred by being a witness to the murder of both his mother and brother, Honorous Jorg Ancrath is but thirteen and already a man. For he has spat into the eye of death and lived to tell of it. The leader of a band of cutthroats, he fully intends, before his grave is dug, to wear crowns, first a king's and then an emperor's. But to realize his ambitions, he will have to regain his hard father's prickly faith. For that is the avenue to power. But when even his own family betrays him, Jorg is left with no choice but to summon his will, his determination, and his cruelty to forge his own bloody path to victory. For there is nothing left but to make revenge upon all those who have taken from him the life he could have had.

Prince of Thorns is a vulture, an irredeemably bleak adventure that'd as soon pick out your eyes as look at you. Its dirty, jagged world is strongly suggestive of a far future England limping along after a global, nuclear holocaust. Though the environment appears to have recovered somewhat from the Day of a Thousand Suns, society has gone the other way, descending from chaos into authoritarianism. From authoritarianism, matters have regressed even further into a kind of fractious feudalism where the law, as such, resides along the sharp edge of a swordblade. While other cultural elements have survived the holocaust -- Christianity, if not its church; historical text, if not their meaning --, this medieval society, animated by mysticism and ghoulishness, has, by far, the strongest sway.

This is a difficult novel. While it presents a portrait of the bleakness of medieval life that is rightfully stripped of all its romantic claptrap, the utter lack of any redemptive elements makes the novel a bitter pill indeed. Anyone interested in gritty fantasy should be braced for such grotesque grimness, having no doubt cut their teeth on the likes of Abercrombie, Morgan, Kearney, et al. And yet, for all their cynicism, moments of levity and hope broke through the unremitting blackness of these other tales. True, they were lights that glowed but weakly, sickly, but they glowed nonetheless. The extent to which Mr. Lawrence has taken this theme to its nihilistic conclusion, total gloom, is either the natural progression of a genre ridding itself of High Fantasy's nonsense, or it is simply the efforts of a hack to carve out some space for himself in a genre that demands more skill from its authors than he can summon. Genius or failed mimicry? I lean towards the latter, but I may well lack that spark of brilliance that allows those rare few among us to spot genius even while it emerges.

Bold and provocative, but if you needed a sickbag for Joe Abercrombie, you'll need a mental enema for Mr. Lawrence. (2/5 Stars)

Lion of Liberty by Harlow G. Unger

From The Week of March 12, 2012

Even those of us who do not subscribe to the Great Man theory of history must concede that there are turning points in time, nexuses at which momentous events are met and shaped by special individuals. Julius Caesar at Pharsalus, King John with Magna Carta, and Abraham Lincoln in the American Civil War are just a few examples of the countless incidents at which individual will re-wove the tapestry of humanity's future. Perhaps we would all be better off if this were not the case, as, in such contests, the authoritarians appear to carry the day as often as the altruists, but not all things can be decided in committee. Sometimes, decisiveness is required to seize the moment and forge from it a lasting good that will outlast a lifetime. Though he was no less flawed than the rest of us, Patrick Henry stood at the heart of one such moment. This alone makes him a man worthy of study.

A man of homesteads and faith, of country life and country values, Patrick Henry (1736-1799) rose up from modest origins to not only help win American independence, but to leave a lasting legacy on the nation he helped create. The Virginian-born son of Scottish and English immigrants, he twice, in his youth, tried his hand at entrepreneurial enterprise, failing on both occasions, calamities that left his learned and ambitious family concerned for his future. But after becoming a lawyer in his mid-twenties, and after using his gift for oratory to mount several successful defenses of Virginian clients, he found his calling.

His ascending star eventually took him, at 29, to the Virginia legislature where, after the Boston Tea Party signalled the Massachusetts rebellion, he gave an impassioned speech advocating that Virginia, by far the largest and wealthiest of the American colonies, should rise up in common cause with the Boston radicals and throw off English tyranny. This speech, along with his singular oratory and his unwillingness to accede to the conventions of the moment, eventually elevated him to the newly created office of Governor of Virginia, a position he would hold through some of the most turbulent moments of the fight for American independence. Though he is now best remembered for the patriotic slogan, "give me liberty or give me death," his contributions to the formative years of the United States, along with his advocacy for the anti-Federalist cause, have left upon his country an imprint the likes of which has been bettered by only a few.

Lion of Liberty is an excellent, if myopic, biography of one of the United States' founding figures. Mr. Unger, an American historian, has winningly captured both the life and the mentality of a fascinating individual who, but for "give me liberty or give me death," has been largely consigned to history by the steady, continuous rise of American Federalism, an ideology against which he fought bitterly. From his country origins, to his missteps as a businessman, to his contributions to the Revolution, to his later years as a lawyer, the author neglects no chapter of Henry's history in an effort to paint a most thorough portrait of a flawed but brilliant mind, unshackled by prejudice, bigotry, or lust for power. In this, he would appear to take a backseat to none of his contemporaries.

However, while Mr. Unger's recount of Henry's life is pleasingly thorough, he almost entirely ignores his subject's family. Occasionally, there are passing references to a son, John, who succumbed to madness during the Revolution, and his wife, Sarah, who suffered grievously in relative isolation while her husband was off creating a country, but these are merely scraps, token nods in the direction of a fuller tapestry. And it's not as though Mr. Unger lacked the room to flesh out the portraits of Patrick Henry's supporting cast. After all, he capitalized on every opportunity to expand upon the man's extraordinary virility. Perhaps a few of these passages could have been assigned to a better cause.

Notwithstanding its single-mindedness, Lion of Liberty is wonderful and readable history. Given the extent to which it restores to the light of day the contributions of a marginalized giant of history, it is worthy work. (4/5 Stars)

1688 by Steven Pincus

From The Week of March 12, 2012

It is possible to view the whole of human history as one long march to equality. For what began as a species ensnared by tribal ties and hierarchical societies has, over the long, dark centuries, evolved into a civilization of souls at least partially ruled by the freedom to think and do as they choose. More over, this march has bestowed upon us the momentum necessary to fulfil our universal destiny of becoming an intelligent species governed by fair laws and equitable opportunity. However, an important question remains.

How has this march been sustained? How were kings and tyrants, warlords and high priests, convinced to shed their all-consuming powers and reduce themselves to regular citizens? Did the people rise up and take back the authority they had given to their betters, or was this authority frittered away, a currency spent by profligate overlords? Perhaps both are possible avenues towards equality, but it is the latter that seems to have brought down many of our most famous rulers. James II of England is no exception.

The catholic king of a protestant nation, James II, the last member of the House of Stuart to wear the English crown, was, in the main, a pious king who, in the name of reform, enacted numerous laws and empowered new institutions in an effort to modernize a realm still staggered by Oliver Cromwell and his Commonwealth. Initially, his reforms bore fruit, resulting in a potent army, capable of withstanding attacks from mainland powers, and a clergy able to practice James' Liberty of Conscience, a policy that put Catholic priests on equal footing with their fellow religionists. However, deeply troubled by rebellious protestant lords and confronted by a largely hostile parliament, James, instead of consolidating his gains and passing them onto his heirs to further, doubled down on his reforms: ordering that the officer core of his army be stacked with loyal catholics, using the courts to attack religious leaders who resisted him, and re-affirming that his power to rule descended from God himself and that, therefore, no parliament could gainsay him without defying the divine.

James II's transition from reformist to authoritarian triggered, in 1688, a revolution in England. In parliament, political differences were set aside for the universal goal of ousting the increasingly tyrannical James and replacing him with a monarch who would happily submit himself to the laws of parliament, acknowledging that assembly of citizens as the paramount body of authority in the land. William of Orange, the protestant husband of James II's daughter, became the ideal candidate. And so, after he agreed in that same year to invade England with a force of Dutch troops, and after those troops easily routed James II's new army, sending the king into exile, the revolution was complete and William III of England became the first monarch to rule an England governed by the new and perpetual Bill of Rights.

Though 1688 is a thorough, academic history of this Glorious Revolution, and though it exhaustively examines some of the revolution's triggers, it is a tome entirely too preoccupied with its author's own grudges. Instead of devoting some of its 650-some pages to establishing solid biographies for the major players in this most vital of historical dramas -- James, the fallen monarch; William III, his son in law and successor; Henry Compton, the rebellious bishop; or even the heads of the Wigs and the Tories, parliament's two major political forces --, Mr. Pincus devotes himself to refuting the claims of fellow historians, a pervasive attitude that grounds his text in esoteric arguments. For those who populate the insular, academic circles in which Mr. Pincus must swim, debates over whether or not the Glorious Revolution was conservative or progressive, or whether or not it can be considered a revolution at all, may well be cause for much excitement and debate. But for the rest of us, who are merely interested in the historical milestones that mark the progress of humanity, these are irrelevancies which pale in comparison with actual events.

Notwithstanding its author's many preoccupations, 1688 contained valuable information. Mr. Pincus' contention that the relatively good state of English roads lead to the swift dispensing of information, which in turn fuelled public interest in government, which in turn hamstrung James II, leading to the revolution, is fascinating. He adds other heavy chapters on the state of economics and religion in late 17th century England, both of which bear edible fruit. But ultimately, Mr. Pincus' distractions doom the piece. I pity those university students compelled to read this. How their eyes must droop... (2/5 Stars)