The Bridge Of D'Arnath by Carol Berg

From The Week of September 17, 2012 Though we endeavor, throughout our lives, to exert as much control over our destinies as possible, Fate is always there, ready to spoil our well-made plans. For while we may find it within ourselves to plot our own futures, we cannot dictate broader events. these are the gestalt of other actors who, in chaotic concert, weave a tapestry of action upon which we must work. Most of us will be indifferent to this fateful intersection of individual and world; after all, most of us experience customary lives which lack the mass to change the pattern of life. and yet, those rare few who do stand at the heart of things will find themselves utterly changed by Fate's hand, a caress that will steer them far from happy lassitude and into painful turmoil. Ms. Berg illustrates in her four-part epic.

Connected by an ancient, mystical bridge that spans the unfathomable void between their two worlds, the lands of Leiran and D'Arnath should have much in common. For centuries, D'Arnathy sorcerers have mingled in medieval Leiran, restoring its sick to health and filling its land with life. but where magic comes easily to the sons and daughters of D'Arnath, it has never been found in the bloodlines of Leiran families, an absence that has encouraged suspicion within the Leiran nobility, suspicions that the realm's priesthood has galvanized into prohibition. Eventually, a ban on sorcerers is found to be insufficient. Now, nothing short of a gruesome death shall be the punishment of any mage found to beoperating within Leiran lands.

One might imagine that the D'Arnathy, superior in every imaginable way to the Leiran, would simply depart, leaving their inferior cousins to their ignorance, but an ancient war with demigods on their own world has reduced 90 percent of their homeland to rack and ruin. what was once beautiful and green is now deserted and brown, the consequence of the wielding of unimaginable power. The D'Arnathy, then, are a people in peril, a people on the brink of homelessness, a people of peace made into the children of war who may yet be wiped clear of the canvas of history.

In The Son of Avonar, the epic's opening volley, we meet Lady Serriana of Leiran, a duchess who has accepted disgrace for living in sin with a D'Arnathy healer. having found in her lover only kindness and steadfastness, her life is shattered when the truth of his identity is publicly revealed and he is put to death in a most cruel fashion. This, coupled with the death of her son by this same man, compels Serriana to reject her life and her station, to withdraw to a distant cottage and spend the rest of her days in solitude.

this reverie, however, is broken when a young man barges into her world. Deeply damaged, he seems not to know his own name, let alone possess any capacity to sensibly communicate with the woman whose life he's interrupted. despite the barriers separating them, though, Serriana comes to believe that this stranger may well come to play a key role in the consequential events to come. For the bridge that has long-connected Leiran with D'Arnath is crumbling. and its falling may well spell the end of freedom on both worlds.

In Guardians of The Keep, the epic's second volume, Serriana's life is once again skewered by fate. having been pardoned by the Leiran king for her relationship with a D'Arnathy, she has returned to Conigor, the keep of her birth, to settle the affairs of her dead brother. duke Tomas' son, however, soon acquires her full attention. for in addition to being somber and sullen, he is deeply suspicious of his aunt who he's been taught to despise. when he fatefully runs away from Conigor, Serriana endeavors to bring him home, but she and her friends are too late. Her brother's son has been welcomed into the arms of the Lords of Zhev'Na, the destructive enemies of the D'Arnathy and they are ready to make of him a god of chaos to stand with them in the ruination of the worlds.

In The Soul Weaver, the epic's third entry, Serriana is again tapped by fate to intercede on behalf of her land when the queen of Leiran herself seeks her out to plead for her aid. the king of Leiran has been incapacitated by agents of the Zhev'Na, a crime which may or may not be connected to the disappearance of their daughter. Serriana agrees to help them even though she is burdened by her own labors. her family, such as it is, is set to be ended by the culmination of the destructive plans of the Zhev'Na. Only a miracle can save them, and Leiran, from ruination.

In Daughter of The Ancients, the final instalment in the epic, the arrival of a thousand-years-dead princess from the wastelands of the Zhev'Na throws the slowly recovering world of the D'Arnathy into chaos. How will she, the eldest heir to the D'Arnathy throne be integrated into the existing ruling structure? Is she as innocent and wronged as she seems, or is she the last ditch ploy of dying gods for one final measure of revenge.? Serriana and her family endeavor to discover the Princess' ultimate purpose while the fates of three worlds hang in the balance.

a sweeping epic, full of consequential deeds and unimaginable dangers, The Bridge of D'Arnath is a difficult, messy adventure. Ms. Berg commands a lyrical pen that does wonderful credit to her work here, blessing it with prose nearly as fine as poetry. But while her facility with language is second to very few, her plots leave a great deal to be desired. Events in this epic lurch from apocalyptic catastrophe to apocalyptic catastrophe, rarely pausing to allow its actors, let alone its readers, to catch their breath. Worse than its implausibility, though, is the degree to which the all-too-frequent explosions, like a bad summer blockbuster, numb the reader, inoculating him to the drama of the piece.

More than the troubled plot, though, Ms. Berg's epic is hobbled by a cast of characters who are rarely allowed to be themselves. Minds are sundered, identities are stolen, and souls are forced into the bodies of those who do not want them. And while these devices allow Ms. Berg to play with ideas of fate and consequence, of identity and personality, they leave the reader with little grasp of what these people are like when they aren't being bombarded by any number of mystical forces. It is, then, no surprise that Serriana is the series' most successful character. for in addition to being a strong-willed heroine worthy of the thousands of pages devoted to her, she is the only one who does not, at some juncture, have her mind scrambled by one godlike force or another.

Let there be no doubt that there is quality here. for all its flaws, The Bridge of D'Arnath bears strong resemblances to the giants of fantasy whose works inspired it. but instead of coalescing from its source materials into its own, distinct being, it is a Frankenstein of Tolkienian questing, Martinian betrayals and Jordanian beauty. It's as if the author conjured up a heroine and welded onto this framework her favorite bits of any number of her own heroes. Unfortunately for her, the weld points are all-too visible to the naked eye.

Interesting work, but the degree to which it is bedeviled by a bloated plot and deformed characters prevents it from taking flight and ascending to the upper echelons of the genre. (2/5 Stars)

The Red Market by Scott Carney

From The Week of September 17, 2012 As much as we are wont to jeopardize them with junk food and cigarettes, stimulants and depressants, our bodies are precious to us, especially when their failure threatens our existences. They are the self-repairing machines that allow us to have families, to perform work, to create beauty and to experience the world. They are the means by which we understand ourselves and the universe. And yet we ride them hard, expecting them to recover from whatever abuses we inflict upon them. Moreover, we expect science to repair them when they cannot repair themselves, confident that their hiccups will not shorten our time on this earth. But what if they do? What if we need the eyes and lungs, the hearts and the livers of others to grow old? What wouldn't we do extend our lives? Mr. Carney explores in his chilling investigation.

Wherever there is supply and demand for a product, there is a market; human flesh is no exception. From hair and skin to organ and tendon, the human body's component parts are of considerable value not only to traders in this market, but those souls desperate for a new lease on life. While some of these red markets are heavily regulated to ensure that the unfortunate aren't exploited by those of means, regulation does not eliminate the need. It merely compels the honor-bound to curtail their behavior while forcing underground all those willing to surrender their scruples to feed the need of the desperate.

From the collecting of Asian hair for sale to American women to the harvesting of the eggs of poor women for sale to the fertility-challenged, Mr. Carney immerses himself in this dark, exploitative underworld that has long-since given up on the notion of the body as sacred. He meets women who felt compelled to sell kidneys in order to procure medicine for their children. He encounters young women who saw no other option but to sell their eggs in order to make rent. He even spends time with men and women who have turned the clinical trialling of medicines into a profession, jeopardizing their longterm health for shortterm profit. If someone can live without it, someone has sold it, participating in a system worth billions of dollars, annually, very little of which flows into the hands of those who need it most.

For all its ghoulishness, The Red Market is captivating work, no moreso than in its introduction which seizes the reader by the throat and demands his full attention. Mr. Carney, a freelance journalist and frequent contributor to Wired Magazine, converts the tragic death of one of his colleagues, abroad in Asia, into a complex journey that takes him from the slums of India to the gleaming labs of Europe, exposing, throughout, a system far from clean or transparent. He contends that, though our ethics and our legislation have the best of intentions, the notion of organ donation is a fallacy that attempts to salve our consciences, to keep from looking too deeply at the necessary costs of a market in human flesh. For while it may be that some of us agree to surrender our organs when we have no more need of them, the system that procures those organs has tangible costs both financial and moral.

Moreover, Mr. Carney makes the powerful case that the regulating of red markets, though in some sense necessary, serves to create the very forms of exploitation they are attempting to stamp out. After all, if someone's need is sufficiently great, or grave, they are not going to listen to their government decry human flesh; they are going to procure what they require. And wherever there is money willing to be spent on a thing there are people willing to take the risk of procuring that product in the hope of handsome remuneration. It is an economic principle as old as human history. Legislation has no hope of standing up to such ancient power.

Tying together economics, exploitation and the human spirit, The Red Market is a deeply disturbing examination of the extent to which we will sell our health for those we hold most dear. There are no easy answers here, but their stories cry out for justice, for some system of sanity to keep these unsfortunats from being so unmercifully used. For until science bestows us with the blessing of artificial organs, the needy will always be out there, just waiting for the desperate to give them what they require. (4/5 Stars)

Countess Dracula by Tony Thorne

From The Week of September 17, 2012 cruelty is a force as puzzling as it is pernicious. Capable of ruining lives and cultures with equal ease, it has engulfed entire centuries in blood and war, its ugly urges spelled out in scars that persist to this day. But while its existence is undeniable, its origins are less clear. For humanity is a species built on altruism, on the singular notion that one act of kindness will be returned with interest. It is this very system of positive reciprocity that has built our civilization. This too is undeniable. Where, then, is there room for cruelty in this equation? It seems antithetical to the very ideas that have elevated humanity out of the muck of ignorance. Whatever its origins, its power is tragically clear, a truth demonstrated in Mr. Thorne's biography of one of history's most gruesome figures.

A woman now hopelessly sheathed in legend, Elizabeth Bathory has become a titillating symbol of cruelty. A 16th-century daughter of one of Hungary's most powerful noble families, she has had ascribed to her, by various, contemporary sources, unimaginable acts of brutality which she was said to have salaciously inflicted upon her own female servants. Having reputedly cultivated a small circle of cronish confidantes to execute her fiendish will, she subjected these helpless girls to boiling baths and sadistic floggings which were said to have filled her halls with blood and death. So legendary was she that her cruelties inspired the myth of the heartless mistress bathing in the blood of virgins in order to recapture the beauty of her spent youth.

But who was Elizabeth Bathory? And just how cruel has history been to her? To answer this question, Mr. Thorne, a cultural historian, delves into the histories of both the Countess and the region that birthed her to unearth a handful of tantalizing clues about this most controversial creature. He discovers that, while the Countess was by no means an angel, her deeds were only remarkable for having been authored by a woman. Bathory was a product of a dark, warlike period in European history, one that produced many masculine atrocities. When these crimes are committed by men, Mr. Thorne argues, they are accepted as the deeds of a man shaped by his time. But when a woman wields a knife dripping in innocent blood, then these are not crimes but unforgivable sins that cannot be tolerated.

Charting the political forces that animated Bathory's world, Mr. Thorne makes the convincing case that the Countess' crimes were inflated by men who had every reason to discredit her. For proof, he points to Bathory's perilous position. For while she was undoubtedly one of her realm's most powerful figures, she was a widow with vast estates and near-endless wealth, both of which were coveted by her family and her rivals. With enemies lurking in every corner, waiting only for a weakness upon which to pounce, her downfall was as certain as sunrise. And so, when the abused bodies of dead servants were discovered on her land, and this evidence married to the compelling testimony of a loyal priest who had previously complained about rumors of ill-treatment from Bathory's castle, the means of her demise was assured. She would be devoured by the wolves she could no longer keep at bay.

Though Countess Dracula is at times dry, burdened by a blur of deeds and families that have long-since been pulled down into the depths of history, it is simultaneously a tempered and scholarly reconstruction of the life of a woman of her time. For Mr. Thorne is correct to contend that, if we but thought of Bathory as a man, these awful deeds would be contextualized in the broader life of a tyrant. Any of a hundred men have done no worse than Elizabeth Bathory, but these cruelties are viewed through a more adoring lens. In the Countess' case, her gender makes her unusual, allowing it to play into Christian preconceptions of sinfulness that have helped propel her out of reality and into nightmare. Bathory was undoubtedly brutal, but she is also a reminder that cruelty does not stand alone. It has causes. And if we are willing to recognize this for Tamerlane, then we must also do so for the Countess.

A sober but rewarding analysis of a difficult subject. Mr. Thorne does well with what he has. (3/5 Stars)

The Tamir Triad by Lynn Flewelling

From The Week of September 10, 2012 As much as we define ourselves by the fidelity of our friends, the magnitude of our wealth, the customs of our culture and the values of our families, identity dictates who we are. For long before the trappings of civilization influence us, identity demands that we pursue the passions that burn in our hearts. Everything, from how we cope with fear to how we manage our expectations, is filtered through our self-regard. For the pain of acting against how we think of ourselves is too much to bear. We must be the person we feel inside or else we are lost to shame and humiliation, to lies and deceptions. Ms. Flewelling vividly demonstrates this truth in her trilogy which is as bold in conception as it is brave in execution.

A kingdom of warriors and wizards, queens and knights, Skala is a realm in conflict. Defined by an ancient pact with its divine patron, the Lightbringer, who promised to protect it from rack and ruin so long as the realm was lead by a queen of the blood, Skala has long been a land in which men and women were equally free to pursue their own destinies. But after centuries of female rule, a king has elevated himself to the throne, usurping the place of his own sister in order to claim for himself the might of Skala. This duplicitous turn of events not only drives the king's faithful sister mad, it has exposed the land to all manner of blood plagues and foreign armies, both of which threaten to decimate the realm. Skala has broken faith with a god. And such beings are rarely known for their forgiveness or mercy.

In The Bone Doll's Twin, the trilogy's opening volume, we are witness to a terrible secret. Mad princess Ariani, deposed by her brother, labors to give birth to twins. A boy and a girl, this ought to be a joyous event for Skala, but Ariani's misfortune deepens when the boy fails to survive the night, leaving only the girlchild as living proof of her blood and her agony. Worse yet, her brother, the king, has cruelly decreed, as a part of a wider crackdown on women participating in matters outside the hearth, that female offspring of the royal blood are to have their lives ended in order to secure his position on the throne. Should the king learn that Ariani's surviving child is a girl, he is sure to insist she be killed.

Fatefully, wizards attending Ariani save the girlchild's life by mystically disguising her, using the essence of her dead brother to impose upon her the appearance of a boy. Thus, to all but a secret few, Tobin, child of Ariani, is a prince, free to grow up unencumbered by the king's scorn and suspicion. Not even Tobin himself is aware of his true identity, not until he has become a young, promising companion of the crown prince Korin, son of the usurper king, and then it is far too late to go back. For Tobin is now a warrior, a young man of station and power. To reject that life for one of a girl, even if it is to heal her realm, is a bridge too far. But then she has not reckoned on the will of the gods.

In The Hidden Warrior, the trilogy's second instalment, Skala's deterioration reaches critical mass. Attacked by its rival, Plenimar, who employ necromancers to steel their assaults, its capital is burning and its king is flailing. The gods have withdrawn their favor from the beleaguered realm, plunging its people into chaos and war. Their only hope now resides in prince Tobin who must reveal his true identity as the sole female heir to the throne. For if she were to sit the throne, reborn as queen Tamir, she could mend the pact with the gods and bring peace back to her land. But then, how can she declare herself to the world when she cannot even accept her own identity?

In The Oracle's Queen, the trilogy's final entry, the war between Skala and Plenimar reaches fever pitch. What's left of Skala's nobility has rallied to Tobin's banner. And yet, a once faithful friend, crown prince Korin, lurks in a damp but important fortress, nursing his wounded pride. For Tobin, or Tamir -- he does not know which story to believe -- has usurped his place, an event which causes the affection Korin once had for Tobin to be devoured by anger and enmity. These dark emotions open the door to the manipulations of a powerful wizard who has so far cynically served the royal family. Civil war hangs like an ugly haze on Skala's cloudy horizon. It is a realm battered and beaten, but the desire for power is too strong for the selfish to let the land rest. Power must be had. And war seems the only way.

As confrontational as it is laborious, The Tamir Triad is a breath of original air in a fantasy genre paralyzed by derivations. While her world and its magics rarely deviate from the norm, Ms. Flewelling's bold choice to take on the painful dilemmas thrown up by gender confusion affixes to her familiar hull an unapologetic masthead that leads the reader into uncharted waters. Unsurprisingly then, sad prince Tobin animates this entire series. Reminiscent of children compelled by their parents to assume a gender that does not suit them, he labors to please his parents, little knowing that they have bestowed upon him an identity he didn't choose and a destiny he didn't ask for. It is left to him to not only discover that he's been living a lie, but to forge a path out of that lie to some kind of identity he can live with, some manner of self-representation that will allow him to marry together the two people nature and nurture have forced him to become.

However, as much as Tobin elevates this trilogy out of the ordinary, Ms. Flewelling's greatest accomplishment here is the darkly aggressive manner in which she raises these questions of identity. This sgrim, challenging and even brutal series is not one easily swallowed by young adults. For Tobin is not ushered into girlhood by puppies and faeries. In her case, accepting herself is also accepting the uneasy mantle of absolute, monarchical power, power which can, and is, easily abused. In this, the author steers clear of making any sort of feminist declarations. In fact, Tobin's journey reads much more as as the acceptance of the cares and responsibilities of adulthood than it does as any sort of parable for the superiority of womankind. This, combined with an unwillingness to pull any punches, lends the trilogy a wonderful, Gothic energy.

But for all that is praiseworthy about The Tamir Triad, there are missteps here. Ms. Flewelling's roster of supporting actors leave a lot to be desired. Though they have clearly been given a great deal of thought, too many of them fall into the simplistic polarities of good and evil, heroic and villainous. In particular, there is insufficient explanation for why the story's antagonists insist on defying the protagonists. Greed and the thrill of manipulation are apparent, yes, but there is almost no sense of the kind of self-preservation that would ordinarily cause such villains to reform their strategies and live to fight another day. Instead, their relentless assaults serve little purpose but to force the heroes to strike them down. Moreover, large swaths of the three novels are taken up with meticulous reconstructions of medieval life which, though appealing initially, wears upon the reader, fattening up an already lengthy epic.

Nonetheless, while the work may be flawed, the degree to which Ms. Flewelling willingly engages with a difficult and even torturous issue transforms the trilogy from a stone into a diamond. And though it may be rough around the edges, the degree to which it shines leaves the reader unconcerned with its blemishes. (4/5 Stars)

Social Engineering by Chris Hadnagy

From The Week of September 10, 2012 Ever since humans possessed the power of speech, they have been in the con game. For we are social, hierarchical animals, qualities which lend themselves to the manipulation of the thoughts and feelings of those closest to us. These tweaks of ego, these posturings for status, needn't be malevolent, or even harmful. They might be as innocent as looking our best in order to make a good impression upon someone we desire, to get a job we wish to have, or even to express our trustworthiness to those who might otherwise judge us. But they can just as easily bear cruel intent -- deflating truths murmured into the trusting ears of our competition, misdirections knowingly bestowed upon the credulous --, actions which allow us to gain advantages at the expense of both the feelings and the fortunes of others. Though these skills have always played important roles in human interplay, they have never loomed larger than they do now in our interconnected, global world. Mr. Hadnagy demonstrates in his uneven work.

Defined as the victimization of individuals through trickery and manipulation, social engineering is one of the most powerful and pervasive weapons in the world of modern espionage. Deploying a host of tools, from confidence games to software exploits, the social engineer typically preys upon both the kindness and the credulity of strangers in order to achieve one of three customary goals: to penetrate and control computer networks, to test the security systems in place to protect such networks, or to harvest information for fun and profit. Though

Whereas hacking requires the hacker to possess extensive knowledge of both computers and the languages used to program them, social engineering demands that one only possess enough charm to convince the innocent to unknowingly act against their own best interests. Consequently, while its weakness resides in the fact that the exploiter needs a mark upon which to prey, its great strength stems from its capacity to entirely bypass every form of computer encryption implemented to protect sensitive systems. A social engineer does not need usernames and passwords; he does not rely upon the manipulation of ones and zeros. He hacks people, not computers. And but for their own sense of self-preservation, humans have no such safeguards.

As frustrating as it is enlightening, Social engineering is a sometimes fascinating journey through the world of human hacking. Mr. Hadnagy, who has specialized in this field for some time, discusses numerous, nightmarish scenarios in which data vital to both corporations and individuals has been stolen by simply convincing a receptionist to put a USB key into her work computer. The gravity of both his claims and his observations have been backed up by two recent cases, that of Matt Honan and of Stuxnet, both of which used social engineering to destroy an individual's digital life, in the case of the journalist, and to significantly damage an Iranian nuclear reactor, in the case of the worm. In this, Mr. Hadnagy reveals a most critical truth, that a system is only as secure as its weakest point.

Hackers are not foolish. Why lay siege to a digital fortress when one can poison its wells, or parachute onto its walls? A clever exploiter probes for weaknesses, flaws in the system, and attacks there, applying as much pressure to the most vulnerable point until it yields to his demands. It is not the fortified gates we must worry about. It is the smiling, friendly person who can be used as an unwitting pawn in a game they cannot understand.

But while Mr. Hadnagy demonstrates this point with admirable clarity, Social Engineering reads, in every other respect, as an exercise in self-aggrandizement. These 350 poorly composed pages are saturated by the author's ego, the masturbatory fantasies of which stain the entire work. I have no doubt that Mr. Hadnagy has helped people. Nor is there any question that his work may arm the credulous with weapons against the attacks of the devious. And yet, it is impossible to escape the smugness with which Mr. Hadnagy conveys these lessons. Consequently, his supercilious tone, which is as offensive as his prose is childlike, mars the work irreparably.

This is an important topic. And though Mr. Hadnagy has much to teach, his ego and his pen both fail him. (2/5 Stars)

Pompeii by Mary Beard

From The Week of September 10, 2012 The past is handed down to us through images frozen in time. For as much as literature can teach us about the nuts and bolts of historical eras, only images have the power to captivate our imaginations, to depict, with a stroke, both the continuity of human need and the mutability of human custom. With shocking ease, they can declare to us the realities of life so often buried by the portentousness of the word. But such images go beyond tapestry and graffiti. They go beyond art. Some are bestowed upon us by fate and physics, both of which combined, with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, to gift to us a town frozen in time, a town Ms. Beard thoroughly reconstructs in her vivid snapshot of this most infamous Roman town.

A town of merchants and slaves, citizens and gladiators, Pompeii was, until 79 AD, a fairly typical town in the heart of the Roman Empire. Filled with shops and brothels, conflict and politics, it operated within the great shadow cast by the imperial capital at Rome. But though its significance may have been vanishingly small relative to the historical heart of the Republic, this did not dissuade its people from availing themselves of its public baths, of congregating in its numerous bars, of praying in its temples and attending its numerous parties. The town even possessed a 20,000-seat coliseum at which its gladiators fought and died for the pleasure of its residents. For generations, the loving and the lovelorn, the fortunate and the foolish, packed its streets and lived under its roofs until, one day, it all came to an end.

A tempestuous region that had been recently shaken by earthquakes powerful enough to damage homes, it would've come as little surprise to the wise that Pompeii was in line for another temblor. But none of them could've imagined that this latest disaster would be the last as they knew it. On that fateful day in 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted, angrily dumping upwards of 20 feet of ash onto Pompeii's streets, burning into the souls of its inhabitants and into the walls of its structures, scars that would outlast the empire, to be rediscovered and chronicled centuries on by historians eager for a glimpse at a place and a time enshrouded in legend. The volcanic holocaust preserved all from the trivial to the portentous while leaving, for scholars, tantalizing gaps in the context necessary to properly place such evidence. It is a town millennia gone. And these are its bones.

Though at times beset by a scholarly dryness, Pompeii is, in the main, a rewarding journey through a town preserved in volcanic amber. Ms. Beard, a professor of Classics at Cambridge, attacks her subject with passion and skepticism. The former permeates the work, enlivening her summations of Pompeiian life which range from food to sex, casts to coins. The latter, meanwhile, is the wise lens through which Ms. Beard views her archaeological delvings. For while others are willing to draw exciting but hasty conclusions from scrawls on the walls of brothels and from bowls on the bartops of shops, she holds herself to a higher, more admirable standard which prevents her from misleading the reader down the path to supposition. This wariness is most welcome, not only because the author presents it with deftness and humor but because of ancient Pompeii's place in modern culture, a fascinating, engrossing tourist trap at which many tall tales can be spun for personal gain.

There's no avoiding that the work, at times, stalls, burdened by too many names and too many customs unfamiliar to those of us who have not spent a lifetime studying antiquity. Nonetheless, when Pompeii shines, it does so brightly, reminding us of the temporary nature of custom and tradition. For what seems to us both obvious and permanent seems to those who follow us strange and ephemeral. This is a welcome lesson, one that opens our eyes to the foreign and compels us to view it with as much legitimacy as we do the familiar.

A pleasing if uneven journey. (3/5 Stars)

The Diving Universe by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

From The Week of September 03, 2012 Though it is now fashionable, particularly in entrepreneurial circles, to marginalize the value of history in favor of the sciences, there is perhaps no field of study more vital to the continuity of our culture and our worldview than history. For while the sciences have engineered our civilization, bestowing upon us a society uplifted by technology, history has blessed that world with knowledge of the arts and of philosophy, giving color and depth to a world otherwise reduced to mathematics. What's more, history has made the technological world possible by preserving the wisdom of the ancients, meticulously storing their insights for a future in which our finest minds can further chip away at the mysteries of the universe. Without history, we have no link to our past, no cultural heritage to proceed from, no knowledge to rely upon, and no wisdom to help us avoid the catastrophic mistakes of fallen civilizations. We are merely creatures eking out an existence identical to those experienced by our ancestors, grubbing in the mud for food and shelter. Ms. Rusch demonstrates this truism effectively in her uneven series.

Millennia from now, humanity will have travelled so far from Earth that the planet's location, even its appearance, will be little more than a memory. Humanity will have explored the Milky Way galaxy, finding on its millions of habitable planets little by way of intelligent life. It will consider itself supreme. But eventually, so much time will have past that some of these human cultures will have spun off from the main body of humanity, creating their own civilizations, their own histories. Attempts will be made to re-knit the fabric of humanity, but those efforts will fail, allowing these limbs of humanity to drift off, set upon their own paths, their own futures. Eventually, they will even forget their origins, truths gilded and enshrouded by legend and myth.

Now, more than 5,000 years have past since the exodus from Earth. But though this should have provided ample time for the various arms of humanity to evolve and develop technological wonders that would obviate any need for sweat and strife, this is very much not so for one of its lost limbs. In this region of space, humanity has long since descended into imperialism and war, as a retrograde empire ruthlessly tries to maintain its grip over its far-flung holdings while keeping its greedy gaze fixed on the Nine Planets alliance, a loose affiliation of worlds who have so far resisted the Empire's attempts at conquest. Such has been the Empire's thirst for war that history and the more peaceful sciences have been neglected, abandoned so that adolescents might play with the weapons of the gods. This has resulted in a society whose overall knowledge is rapidly regressing, a society held up only by the needs of the moment.

In Diving Into The Wreck, the series' first instalment, we are introduced to Boss, the eccentric captain of Nobody's Business, a mid-sized spaceship customized for salvage and exploration. Boss, something of an expert in archaeological digs in space, has, for years now, hired out her talents to tourist groups interested in the ruins of spacecraft which, with the passage of time, have lapsed into legend. It's by no means a perfect life, but considering that she's lucky to even be alive, Boss isn't complaining. After all, the childhood experiment that not only claimed the life of her mother, but lead to her father abandoning her, could have easily claimed her life as well. But it didn't and now, regardless of the nightmares, Boss is determined to be her own woman.

However, when she discovers the wreck of a lifetime, everything changes. All her plans for her future, along with the walls she's put up between herself and her past, are threatened when she verifies that, yes, she has just stumbled across the ruins of a Dignity Vessel, rumored to have been part of an old Earth fleet that's now thousands of years dead. Purported to have lacked faster-than-light travel, the vessel should not be anywhere near this region of space. And yet, there it is, the archaeological dive of a lifetime. Boss must know its secrets, even if they bring her uncomfortably close to deeply disturbing truths about her own past.

In City of Ruins, the second volume in The Diving Universe, boss finds herself the reluctant but determined spearhead of two distinct missions, the most vital of which is to preserve the independence of the Nine Planets alliance. For the Empire, she's learned, is attempting to recreate lost technologies found in the wreck she discovered in Diving Into The Wreck, technologies that will certainly grant them the power to overwhelm the worlds that have so far managed to maintain their independence from the Empire. Feeling responsible for these technologies falling into imperial hands, Boss begins a crusade to re-balance power throughout the region, little knowing that it will put her in direct opposition to the father who abandoned her.

Her second mission, however, comes upon Boss rather shockingly when she unexpectedly comes face-to-face with humanity's past. For an accident has brought into her time a living, breathing dignity Vessel complete with a bewildered crew of humans who have travelled 5,000 years in an instant. As the men and women on the ship try to adjust to this crushing revelation, boss attempts to establish first-contact with these legends. Though her efforts are thwarted by cultural and linguistic barriers that have calcified into thick walls in the five millennia separating their times, they manage to establish a connection just in time to realize that the Empire is keenly interested in Boss' activities and the awesome discovery she has unearthed.

In Boneyard, the most recent effort in the series, boss and the captain of the dignity Vessel try to integrate their teams under a single corporate umbrella which will continue the search for lost technologies, for the discovery of the lost dignity Vessel has prompted Boss to realize that her civilization is actually behind the one that existed 5,000 years ago. But while she and captain Cooper continue to seek outt the fate of the fleet that his ship once called home, a member of Boss' team has been captured deep in imperial space. Knowing that the Empire will stop at nothing to pry the secrets of Boss' mission from her friend, boss must try to rescue her, but at what cost?

Energized by its unusual approach to science fiction, The diving Universe is, in turns, entertaining and infuriating. Ms. Rusch, an author of works that range from Star Wars to Fey, writes in clear, unchallenging prose that invites a wide audience to enter into her unusual universe. For where other series concentrate on wars and aliens, weapons and conspiracies, Ms. Rusch devotes herself to a much more quiet and methodical world, one in which reason and patience rescue her characters from peril far more often than heroism does. Her emphasis on archaeology is a bold choice. For it asks the reader to re-imagine the field from the perspective of an outsider. Our digs try to rediscover our own past, but what would it be like to have someone else try to rediscover ours? What if we were nothing more than dusty bones buried under centuries of collapsed infrastructure? This, combined with a vivid expression of her passion for diving, lends Ms. Rusch's work a charmingly rustic feel for a series set in space.

However, as much as its conception is inventive and its setting is imaginative, the series' characters and their circumstances are, at times, disastrous. As much as I am inclined to grant the author the benefit of the doubt -- perhaps her actors are simply acting in accordance with the customs of their future society --, they can be incredibly pedantic. Identical arguments are not only held more than once in the same novel, similar disputes are repeated across the entire series, causing the unified whole to feel as though it's running in place. Worse, Ms. Rusch spends virtually no time developing this supposedly villainous empire. Readers are left completely uninformed about its structures, its customs, even its rulers. Its only representatives are individuals who already have tangled and thorny histories with the story's characters which makes it impossible to distinguish the Empire's villainy from the ill-feeling created by personal disputes. It seems clear that Ms. Rusch wants her readers to take the Empire's authoritarianism on faith, to view it through the same biased lens that Boss does, but this prevents us from building up our own trepidation of the Empire. Instead, we must adopt Boss' view which hardly argues for anxiety and urgency. What's the point of having an enemy in a story if we do not fear it?

The Diving Universe is empowered by interesting ideas and intriguing approaches, but it is unfortunately marred by a narrowness of execution that left me wanting much more background and much more urgency. Entertaining, but deeply flawed. (2/5 Stars)