Nothing Lasts Forever: Books I Read in 2022

Note: Blogger glitched at the wrong moment and erased most of yesterday’s original post, so I’ve reconstructed it from what little remained plus whatever my frazzled brain can remember of what I wrote. Because this post was supposed to come out yesterday, there are a couple of temporal references that don’t make sense. 

In 2022 I read a paltry 61 books, a performance only slightly better than last year's all-time low. As with last year, the stresses contemplating existential threats to civilization hampered my ability to focus on reading and blunted my enjoyment of reading for pleasure's sake. I spent far too much time doomscrolling, which in all likelihood represented the majority of my reading this year. 

Overview

Fiction v. Non-Fiction

Fiction: 54
Nonfiction: 7

Genres

Fantasy: 7
Horror: 2
Mainstream: 5
Science Fiction: 25
Star Trek: 12

Books by Decade

1890s: 2
1950s: 1
1960s: 1
1970s: 2
1980s: 7
1990s: 5
2000s: 6
2010s: 16
2020s: 19

Gender Split

Books by Women: 14
Books by Men: 47

Commentary and Analysis

Parity between men and women authors slipped away from me this year, and once again I avoided much of the new and retreated into familiarity. About a third of the books I read this year--23 out of 61--were rereads, including most of Michael P. Kube McDowell's output, several favourites by Lois McMaster Bujold, a handful by Nancy Kress and H.G. Wells, and a few old (and new) novels by Stephen King. 

Science fiction dominated my reading as I sought escape from these times, defeating my ongoing efforts to read more mainstream and literary works. Once I had dreams of reading everything in the western canon; now, not so much. As I get older, I’m finding that, more and more, my reach exceeds my grasp. See? Hoary metaphors, the last resort of the lazy and uninspired. 

I didn’t read much nonfiction this year, aside from matters related to pop culture. I feel bad about that, because I used to read serious, long-format non-fiction as a matter of course, feeling it part of my duty as a citizen to be well-informed. For now, it’s too much for me. 

Enriching Reads

Roderick Thorp's 1979 detective thriller Nothing Lasts Forever was one of my favourite surprises of the year. Nothing Lasts Forever is most famous for serving as the story for the 1988 action film Die Hard, and while Die Hard is one of the best examples of the form, the original novel, in my view, has it beat. Nothing Lasts Forever has all the suspense and thrills of the movie, and if you've seen the movie you already know the plot (with a few key differences in character motivations, backgrounds, and relationships. But the novel's great strengths include considerable emotional heft and a poetic cynicism that actually hurts to read--in a good way. Joe Leland is an ex-fighter pilot and detective, and while he does battle with the terrorists that take over the Klaxon Oil building, we dive deep into Joe's current terror and rage and explore the personal traumas that brought him to this point. There's no “yippee-kai-yay” here, just a bruised, broken human being trying to salvage a little bit of happiness for what's left of his life. 

As an aside, I'm currently reading Roderick Thorp's first novel about Joe Leland, 1966's The Detective. I won't finish it before the clock strikes midnight, so it'll more than likely be the first book I complete in 2023. I'm about a quarter of the way through it, and I'm impressed, so far, by Thorp's handling of Leland's character arc; the younger version of Leland is still a bit cynical, but he's definitely more vital and less ravaged than the man we follow in Nothing Lasts Forever. The Detective, like its sequel, also has a film adaptation: Gordon Douglas' The Detective (1968), starring Frank Sinatra, which I screened earlier this year. Sinatra declined to appear in the film that became Die Hard; on such butterflies does the history of cinema change. 

84K, by Claire North, was the novel that depressed me most in 2022. It's a fine novel of a near-future dystopia and one man's effort to find some absolution in a horrible world he helped create, but the problem is North's supercapitalist nightmare is all too plausible; it's a society where corporations run everything and crimes are punished strictly by fines, effectively giving the rich freedom to do whatever they want to whoever they want and shackling everyone else. It took me forever to read this, because I had to keep putting it down in order to retain my mental health. 

On the other hand, I loved two recent novels by Naomi Novik: A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate. Both follow the adventures of a group of students working to graduate from a university that teaches magic, but I found Novik's prose, characterization, and worldbuilding considerably stronger than the most famous series based on this trope. (And I enjoyed the Harry Potter books!) Novik really makes you care about her characters, and the jeopardy they face is often horrifying. And yet, these are fun books. I groaned when I reached the cliffhanger ending of The Last Graduate to discover there was, at the time I read it, an as-yet-unpublished third book in the series. As I was writing that last sentence, I checked and I'm thrilled to say the third and final book, The Golden Enclaves, has come out and I just bought it. So that'll probably be the fourth book I read in 2023. (Numbers two and three will be a pair of books Leslie gave me back in August.) 

Return to Tomorrow: The Filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture by Preston Neal Jones is one of the most interesting behind-the-scenes chronicles of the filmmaking process I've ever read. Though published in 2014, the personal anecdotes that make up the bulk of this huge tome were captured by the author way back in the late 1970s, during the film's famously tumultuous production.

I read another notable Star Trek-related work of non-fiction this year: 2021’s Star Trek: Designing the Final Frontier, by Dan Chavkin and Brian McGuire. Chavkin and McGuire cover the efforts of the propmasters, production designers, and other talented artists who sourced and modified the furniture, décor, and other set dressing during the filming of Star Trek back in the 1960s. The book is full of gorgeous behind-the-scenes colour photographs and episode stills, and you’ll even learn a little about design principles and history as you read. I never imagined I’d find this particular topic interesting, but the authors did a great job of explaining how mid-20th century design trends informed and shaped the look of Star Trek’s imaginary future. I’ll never look at the show the same way again. 

I took great pleasure in reading Chris Thompson’s Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual, which cleverly serves as an in-universe prop that might have existed on Moonbase Alpha itself; it’s written as a guidebook for new inhabitants of the base, with new material covering the disaster that flung the Moon out of Earth’s orbit in the fall of 1999. The prose elements are crisp, detailed, and meticulously researched, while the graphic design and artwork are really stunning. It’s a gorgeous book, one of the few physical books I bought this year (Designing the Final Frontier being the other notable example). 

I loved this book so much that I pre-ordered the special edition of a follow-up work using the same in-universe conceit: the S.H.A.D.O. Technical Operations Manual, also by Thompson, which describes the technical workings of the fictional anti-alien defence organization featured on UFO, the spiritual prequel to Space: 1999. I haven’t read it yet, but you’ll doubtless see my reaction to it next December 31. 

And finally, in 2022 the two gentlemen who write pseudonymously as James S.A. Corey wrapped up their long-running SF series, The Expanse, with Leviathan Falls. This series pleasantly surprised me from book one, and this series finale is fitting, logical, and bittersweet—a great sendoff for a world and characters I’ve come to really enjoy. It was a series with grand SF ideas and, more importantly, flawed but authentic heroes who were trying to do the right thing in a universe filled with terrible choices. 

Disappointing Reads

Tie-in fiction is a crap shoot at the best of times, but Pocket Books’ recently wrapped up the long-running Star Trek “litverse” because new shows such as Picard and Discovery wrecked the continuity established by the last couple of decades of novels Trek novels. Pocket wrapped things up with a messy, violent not-very-Trek-like trilogy that saw the novelized versions of 90s-era Trek characters sacrifice themselves to prevent a temporal anomaly or some other such nonsense to prevent the destruction of the universe, resetting continuity to allow for more tie-in novels that can take advantage of the new shows. Nonsense, but not a great loss; out of hundreds of novels published, there are maybe two dozen of legitimate quality beyond breezy entertainment. 

Normally I enjoy Philip Pullman’s work, but I didn’t get much out of Serpentine (a His Dark Materials tie-in), The White Mercedes, or The Broken Bridge. None of these books were bad, but they just didn’t engage me as much as some of his other work. In this case, I suspect the problem is me, not Pullman. He’s a gifted guy. 

Because I’d read Nothing Lasts Forever, I figured I may as well read Walter Wager’s 58 Minutes, the inspiration for Die Hard 2. Surprise: 58 Minutes is a better book than Die Hard 2 is a movie, but the decline in quality from Thorp to Wager is pretty much parallel to the decline in quality from Die Hard to its first sequel. Not that Thorp and Wager have anything to do with each other; they just happen to each have written novels turned into movies from the same series. 58 Minutes is engaging for what it is—a high-stakes thriller—but it doesn’t have any of Thorp’s nuance or gift for in-depth character study. 

That’s it for my commentary—here’s what my year in reading looked like, in order of books completed. Scroll to the end for one final thought and a couple of links. 

Month-by-Month

January: 8
Beggars in Spain (Nancy Kress, 1993) 
Beggars and Choosers (Nancy Kress, 1994) 
The Time Machine (H.G. Wells, 1895) 
The Quiet Pools (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1991)
Leviathan Falls (James S.A. Corey, 2022) 
The Future of Another Timeline (Annalee Newitz, 2019) 
Dangerous Visions (Harlan Ellison, 1967) 
A Deadly Education (Naomi Novik, 2020) 

February: 9
The Last Graduate (Naomi Novik, 2021) 
The Galactic Whirlpool (David Gerrold, 1980) 
The Art of John Buscema (John Buscema, 1978) 
John Buscema: Michelangelo of Comics (Brian Peck, 2010) 
Star Trek Coda: Moments Asunder (Dayton Ward, 2021)
Star Trek Coda: The Ashes of Tomorrow (James Swallow, 2021) 
The War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells, 1897) 
Star Trek Coda: Oblivion’s Gate (David Mack, 2021) 
Star Trek Shipyards (Ben Robinson, 2018) 

March: 12
The 22 Murders of Madison May (Max Barry, 2021) 
Emprise (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1985)
Enigma (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1986) 
Empery (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1987) 
Exile (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1992) 
Alternities (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1988) 
Gwendy’s Final Task (Richard Chizmar and Stephen King, 2022) 
Beguilement (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2006)
Sky Captain and the Art of Tomorrow (Kevin Conran, 2021) 
Legacy (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2007)
Passage (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2008)
Horizon (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2009)

April: 2
The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury, 1950) 
The White Mercedes (Philip Pullman, 2017) 

May: 4
The Tumor (John Grisham, 2016) 
Underground Airlines (Ben Winters, 2016) 
Space Station Down (Ben Bova and Doug Beason, 2020) 
The Art and Soul of Blade Runner 2049 (Tanya Lapointe, 2017) 

June: 1
A History of What Comes Next (Sylvain Neuvel, 2021) 

July: 2
84K (Claire North, 2018) 
Fitzpatrick’s War (Theodore Judson, 2004) 

August: 4
Return to Tomorrow: The Filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Preston Neal Jones, 2014) 
Star Trek Department of Temporal Investigations: Shield of the Gods (Christopher L. Bennett, 2017) 
The Sins of Our Fathers (James S.A. Corey, 2022) 
Serpentine (Philip Pullman, 2020) 

September: 3
To Everything That Might Have Been: The Lost Universe of Space: 1999 (Robert E. Wood, David Hirsch, and Christopher Penfold, 2022) 
Fairy Tale (Stephen King, 2022) 
Star Trek: Designing the Final Frontier (Dan Chavkin and Brian McGuire, 2021) 

October: 3
Christine (Stephen King, 1983) 
Klingon Bird-of-Prey Haynes Manual (Ben Robinson, 2012) 
Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual (Chris Thompson, 2021) 

November: 6
The Broken Bridge (Philip Pullman, 1990) 
Nothing Lasts Forever (Roderick Thorp, 1979) 
U.S.S. Enterprise Haynes Manual (Ben Robinson, 2010) 
Klingon Bird of Prey Haynes Manual (Ben Robinson, 2012) 
58 Minutes (Walter Wager, 1987) 
Vectors (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 2002) 

December: 5
The Lexington Letter (Anonymous, 2022) 
Too Many Tribbles! (Frank Berrios, 2019) 
I Am Mr. Spock (Elizabeth Schaefer, 2019) 
I Am Captain Kirk (Frank Berrios, 2019) 
Marvel Universe Map by Map (James Hill, 2021) 

Conclusion

That is the year that was for Earl J. Woods and his shrinking library. Nothing lasts forever, truly. 

Head on over to see what Bruce and Leslie had to say about 2022. 

Northern Visitors

 

Straker Strikes

Here is a 28mm scale representation of Ed Straker, Commander-in-Chief of SHADO, the international organization tasked with fighting the secret war against invading aliens as seen on the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson series UFO. Painting this guy was pretty easy thanks to the simplicity of his uniform, but in this case I'm surprised by how well his face turned out; the features are really quite distinct, no thanks to any special technique of mine. I didn't even use a wash. 

Dad and the UFO

On a summer day back in 2007, Dad somehow completely missed spotting the mysterious UFO hovering in the distance. 

UFO: 2099

Whether they'll ever be made remains to be seen, but I'm nonetheless excited by the prospect of new UFO movies and a new space opera television show, Space: 2099, based on Gerry Anderson's original 1970s creations UFO and Space: 1999. UFO was a well-made, well-acted, suspenseful slice of space opera action, while Space:1999 boasted absolutely amazing production design (hampered by leaden direction, acting and screenplays and a ludicrous premise).

I would prefer it, however, if the creators somehow found a way to merge the two concepts, as was originally intended. What became Space: 1999 was originally intended to be UFO's second season. So what if you combined all the best elements of UFO - the suspense, the SHADO organization, the creepy aliens and compelling stories - with Space: 1999's superb production design? You'd have UFO: 2099, in which SHADO commander Straker and his cool, competent Earth-based team would work together (and often butt heads) with Commander Koenig and his assemblage of maniacs on Moonbase Alpha, defending humanity from invasion. (This time, the Moon would remain in Earth orbit, so perhaps the Alpha characterizations wouldn't be as nutty.)

The two concepts work together seamlessly - probably because one concept originally grew from the other. Retain the conceit that SHADO is fighting a secret war with the aliens, all knowledge of extraterrestrials hidden from the public, and you have an interesting recipe for tense, paranoiac SF, with stunning visuals. Good scripts would illustrate some of the more important issues of our time - secrecy, surveillance, terrorism, torture (if you capture an alien, is it immoral to waterboard it for information? It's not human, after all), and perhaps even climate change and responsible resource development if the cover story for the moonbase is harvesting Helium-3 for Earth, for example.

Man, I should write a series bible.

Exploring X-Com: Enemy Unknown

Yesterday I felt a little run down, so a gift from Sean came just in time: a copy of X-Com: Enemy Unknown in my Steam mailbox. Too weak to do much more than use my mouse and keyboard, I lost myself for a couple of hours in an interactive tale of alien invasion.

Enemy Unknown is a sequel/reinvention of a series of very popular turn-based tactical squad shooters from the 90s. Heavily inspired by the early 1970s Gerry Anderson television series UFO, X-Com asks players to oversee the construction of an underground armory/hangar/research base and send out squads of soldiers against any aliens who make it past interceptor defences.

It's a great game. Managing your budget, expanding your base and researching new technology is just as fun as sending your soldiers out to fight the aliens. I find myself regretting every soldier's death, in part because they're reasonably fleshed out: they have names, home countries, different skills, and you can even customize their look. It's kind of heartbreaking when a soldier who's made it through seven missions perishes on the eighth. It's even worse when civilians are killed; yesterday the aliens invaded Ottawa and killed nine innocent people before I managed to complete the mission. I saved only two, and lost one of my own men...a dark day for the X-Com team.

In terms of time invested, I have a feeling this game might rival Fallout: New Vegas and Civilization V. It's that good.

UFO Premier

Last night I dreamed that I wandered out onto the Legislature grounds for lunch, only everything was newly refurbished and the fountains were completely redesigned in multiple tiers. The grounds were packed, and everyone, including, atypically, me, was dressed to the nines in black suits. I sat down and started munching on a ham sandwich, and seconds later overheard Premier Redford discussing the merits of a new UFO TV series, based on the original British show from the early 1970s. She wondered out loud how long the original series had lasted, and I turned around to answer.

"I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but if you're wondering about Gerry Anderson's original UFO show, it lasted for two seasons - or 'series,' as seasons are known in the UK - of 13 episodes each, for a total of 26 episodes."*

"Wasn't that a great show?" Redford gushed. "And the new one is even better, at least based on the pilot!"

"I didn't even know they were making a new show," I confessed. "I'd heard rumors of a movie, but not another series."

"Well, don't miss it again!" she said.

I went back to my sandwich, and looked down in horror to see that my suit was gone and I was sitting there in my underwear in front of the premier and hundreds of other people.

*In fact, UFO ran for one season of 26 episodes, but with a long break in between two 13-episode sections.

Various and Sundry

Note: For two nights in a row, I’ve tried to post this blog from home, only to be thwarted by server errors. Let’s see if a post from my Mac at work is accepted…
Blog-readers, forgive me, for I have sinned; it's been fifteen days since my last entry...

First, a plug: anyone reading this blog (all six of you) should check out another blog, at
. There you'll find the blog of my friends Bruce and Leslie and their son Zak (who has yet to post an entry, I note). Bruce and Leslie also happen to be colleagues; Bruce is the publishing department manager at Hole's (and my nominal boss, although he doesn't like to invoke the hierarchy too often), and Leslie is an ex-boss and often my editor. Both of them are very entertaining, so check out their blog for some cool stream-of-consciousness stuff.

As soon as my friend Allan starts his blog, I'll post a plug here, too. Don't back out, Allan! If I can share my deep, dark secrets with the world, you can, too.

On to other business. I've almost finished watching Gerry Anderson's UFO (see previous blogs, faithful readers!), and the series has taken an interesting turn midway through. Remember how I mentioned that the aliens looked completely human, save a couple of cosmetic changes? Well, as it turns out, something even more sinister is going on...the intrepid men and women of SHADO discover evidence that the humanoid aliens aren't the true forms of the UFOites (oogh) at all. They speculate that the beings they're fighting are a new kind of "machine life..." Kind of a cool precursor to nanotech, although I'm sure that's not what the writers had in mind. I'll have to see what the final four episodes bring.

Coming soon: the screenplay of the Paranoid classic, Bitter Litter!

Bulb Enlightenment

Well, it's finally here - Lois Hole's Favorite Bulbs. The first copies of the book came off the presses today, and everyone at Hole's jumped about gleefully as the quality of the finished product set in. It really turned out well; I'm glad I played a role in its creation. The photography is absolutely spectacular; the colours just blew me away.

But, there's no rest for the weary - there's always another book on the horizon, and I started work today on one of our next big projects.

In other news, I had a chance to redeem myself at Sylvia's with another round of Scrabble. But just as I was building up an impressive lead, our pizza arrived, and my plans for sweet revenge were cruelly foiled. By the Gods! Is there no justice? :-O

Ha ha ha...I'm watching another episode of UFO as I write this, and Sky One was just launched to intercept a possible "you-foe..." and it turned out to be a weather baloon. Whoops. Another hundred million pounds down the drain.

Ouch! And a sexy reporter just whacked Straker over the head with an ash tray. Excellent! Except he should have said, "Ow! No one makes an ash out of me!"

Why aren't I writing TV scripts?

UFO-OH

Whoops...in my last blahg, I made a boo-boo. I called a UFO character "Ken Freeman," when his first name is, in fact, Alec. I'm not sure what I was thinking...

In other news...there is no other news.

UFO

I've been watching Gerry Anderson's 1970s TV series, UFO. It's a post-Thunderbirds, pre-Space: 1999, live-action romp, with all the familiar Anderson hallmarks: transcendent Derrick Meddings model work, peppy music, bizarre fashions, creative sets, a multiethnic mix of characters, and a futuristic setting.

Gerry Anderson's live-action shows, including Space: 1999 and Space Precinct are generally regarded as inferior to his puppet-based, "Supermarionation" efforts - Fireball XL-5, Thunderbirds, and the like. But UFO has surprised me thus far; it shows far more internal consistency than the schizophrenic Space: 1999 ever did, and it's far more tightly written than Space Precinct.

Here's the basic premise: it's the year 1980, and UFOs of unknown origin are swooping down upon a largely unsuspecting Earth, harvesting her citizens for organs. Earth - or rather, the UK - has created a top secret organization, SHADO (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organization) to stop the aliens. SHADO command, hidden beneath a London film studio, is the hub of a far-reaching defence network, including a functioning moonbase with a trio of deadly-looking interceptors, SID (Space Intruder Detector), an artificial intelligence housed within a satellite in Earth orbit, Skydiver, a submarine capable of launching Sky One, an atmospheric fighter plane, and the SHADO mobiles, tracked land vehicles used to hunt down aliens who've managed to penetrate the outer defences and make a landing on Earth. The models are remarkably creative, inspiring a silent "gee whiz!" from anyone who appreciates fine craftsmanship.

American Ed Straker is the show's protagonist, a hard, bitter man who pretends to be a movie producer but secretly commands far greater responsibilities, for he is the commander of SHADO. He is assisted by a much warmer human being, Ken Freeman, his second-in-command and the moral centre of SHADO's claustrophobic universe. These two men, and their huge cadre of secret agents, fighter pilots, submariners, psychologists, and astronauts, fight a silent war for the fate of Earth.

The pilot episode sets the tone for the series: the first hapless humans who spot a UFO are graphically machine-gunned into oblivion by its spacesuited inhabitants, with realistic blood spatters that have excellent shock value even today, let alone in 1970, when the show was originally aired. One member of this unfortunate trio survives his wounds and winds up joining SHADO, but his sister is captured by the aliens. Later, a UFO crashes and an alien is taken into SHADO custody; we discover that the alien has that young woman's organs. It's a chilling scene.

The aliens aren't very alien at all; they're basically human beings with green skin and funky contact lenses. But even as I was thinking to myself, "How cheap; they're just people with bad makeup," one of the characters says, "They're practically identical to us - this green stuff is just chemical residue from their breathing tanks, and these are just contacts to protect them from the sun." By drawing attention to the low-budget makeup, the producers have effectively given us a better mystery to consider: why do these creatures look exactly like us? It should be impossible. But it does explain why they want our organs, or at least it explains why they have a use for them at all.

Commander Straker pronounces "UFO's" as "U-Foes." I'm not sure if the producers intended it, but I interpret this reading as "Unidentified foes," or simply, "you foes." Cool.

The moonbase is populated by three purple-haired British women; one of them, Lt. Ellis, seems to be the nominal commander of the outpost, although in one episode a male, Colonel Foster takes the job, seemingly temporarily. I find it interesting that the producers were willing to position three women as the first line of defence, even if they did put them in skintight silver uniforms and give them fetishistic wigs. Not that I'm complaining...

The show has its faults; often, the aliens appear to be ineffective. In episode after episode, SID detects a UFO (usually a single ship; never more than three), Lt. Ellis scrambles the interceptors, and the UFOs are destroyed. If they slip past the interceptors, you can almost guarantee that Sky One will shoot them down in Earth's atmosphere. Why do they only send just a few ships at once? Why not en masse, since Earth seems to have only three moonbase interceptors and one airborne fighter to defend it? To make matters worse, even if they make it to Earth's surface, UFOs break down in Earth's atmosphere very quickly. The organ harvesting can't be going well with all these limitations, and one wonders why Straker and company are so concerned.

On the other hand, the aliens can be very sneaky. In one memorable episode, a UFO takes advantage of sunspots to slip past Moonbase tracking and lands just a couple of kilometers away from the base. A suited alien steps out with a rifle, creeps towards the base, takes careful aim, and shoots a hole through one of the base's windows. Explosive decompression is the inevitable result, and it's only blind luck that only a single crewman dies. And he's not even blown out the window - the air simply evacuates, and the man slowly suffocates, dying in the airless silence.

The life of a SHADO operative is rarely easy; Commander Straker loses his young son in one episode, largely because of Straker's responsibilities to SHADO. His ex-wife isn't happy, and clearly Straker is shattered by the loss. The atmosphere at SHADO headquarters is almost always tense; there isn't much humour in this show, nor should there be.

Though I've watched less than half of the show's 26 episode run so far, I have to say that I'm impressed. This is one of television's lost gems, and I'm glad I ran across it.