The Sickbay Logs

Before I come to the matter at hand, I first have to appologize for the length of sentences and the style of speech you may encounter in this post, which has already had my teachers sweating in my late years of school, when - in vain - they tried to cut them down to parts of a length less stressful to the reader, but I have just finished The House of Silk, a novel which, although not written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself, presented a most extraordinary adventure of Sherlock Holmes and his faithful biographer Dr. John Watson, and also managed exceptionally well to capture the style of speech and writing of the time. As it is my involuntary habit, in the English language at least, to mimic the style of language last read or heard, you will now have to put up with that as well.
And what better place is there on a warm and bright summers afternoon as this days' was, to read the last pages of a book that would not permit you to give it out of your hand until it was fully read through, than the high branches of a tree? So it was that, as I am home today for the first time in most likely over a month, that I had climbed the apple tree in our garden and made myself comfortable there, to read the end of a story, which was still to make many more turns until it finally reached its conclusion than I had inicially expected to find in the whole of the book. I have to confess, though, that I did not manage to stay in the apple tree for the whole of the last third, as somewhere in the fifteenth chapter my right foot went numb and I decided to leave my lofty surroundings before I was faced with the problem later on that I did not know how to proceed on my way down.
While the book itself is well written and the best homage to one of the inventors of modern crime and detective storries there can be, I have to criticize one point: As much research as Anthony Horrowitz did, and I really give him credit for that as well as his excelent style of writing - I have a few years ago very much enjoyed the first of his Alex Ryder novels - he has obviously never ridden in a horse cart, or spend very much thought about it. In my mind there is no way, and may be a spoiler to anyone who still wants to read the novel, so you may want to skip the rest of the paragraph, that one could chase down a steep road, slippery and snowcovered, with any kind of horse-cart at top speed. Indeed, in my experience, a road as described in the sceene I am refering to, would make even the most experienced cabmen sweat to get down in the slowest walk; any speed above that would seem suicidal. That is the one point where his exploits seem a little exagerated and imposible to a reader learned in the subject, but then again, who still knows anything about horse-carts in the twenty-first century?
Appart from that I have nothing to add to the formidable review already written about this novel and Ready Player One by Liz, so I will travel on straightly to the two other storries I have had the pleasure to read in the last few weeks.


There is also little to write about the novelization of Top Gun, for it is, after all, the novelization of a movie, which is a must-have-watched for anyone who has ever dreamed about flying himself. Although not the most poetic novel ever written, the language is good, and there are no too grave mistakes in translation - for I have read this particular book in German - especially as the translator has decided to keep the original English text in the right parts. This book can not be seen as a standalone, it is easily read through within a day, but it is retelling the story of the movie, bringing back the memories of watching it and a nice way to bring a smile to your face which you can keep in your pocket and take out whenever you wish. It does not contain many things untold in the original story, but it brings some new insight into the thoughts and feelings of the characters, adding some new depth and color to the blured images we hold in our memories from watching the movie.


And that brings me to the last on the list of books I wanted to report upon, although this is not a single book, but books, five in number, the first five of the Time Wars series by Simon Hawke. I have thought a long time about how to approach this subject, and I still do not know, as reviewing each on is own would be just as hard, as reviewing them as a whole, for the plots of the single books are connected to such a degree that telling you more than the general idea of the plot, or mentioning any detail of any specific book, would be a huge spoiler to the one before.
Thus I have decided to start with how I ever came by these books: In my years of school I have been a regular visitor to the city library contained within the school building, and there, especially in my final year, I have bought a not quite small amount of books - mostly Science-Fiction novels - from the libraries bazar, which would otherwise most likely have ended up on the waste-paper-pile. Among these were the first and the third of the Time Wars books, in German of course, The Ivanhoe Gambit and The Pimpernell Plot.
Especialy the first had drawn my attention, to understand that better I have included a picture of the cover here, for I have always loved the Robin Hood and Ivanhoe books, and so it was the obvious result that I should by both of those for not more than 50ct each. I have read those two with great interest, before lately acquiring also the second, fourth and fifth part of this series: The Timekeeper Conspiracy, The Zenda Vendetta and The Nautilus Sanction.
As I have mentioned before, it would spoil the fun for everyone who intended to read these books, to tell any particulars from any book but the first, so I will only outline the general plot here:
In the twentyfourth century, humankind has found a way to travel through time and decided, as they have found that war was neccessary to keep up their economy, to fight their wars on the battelfield of the past rather than the present. For this a supranational corps of arbitrators was founded, who's task was to collect data on the future soldiers fighting in the wars of the past, calculating scores based on that data and thus setteling disputes in the future, but also to watch the timestream, so no disruption would come up, big enough to actually part the timeline and create a new future.
Off course the latter is not as easy and so at the beginning of the first book a group of common soldiers, not so common after all as we shall soon see, find themselves at the sheer impossible looking task of saving the future by taking on the roles of Ivanhoe, his squire, Robin Hood and Little John, who will soon find that they have quite a hard time with the not-so-merry men of Sherwood Forrest. Without wanting to spill any more details I want to say here that by now I am quite surprised to see that my favourite character here is not the usual charismatic leader, as it would be under other circumstances (as represented in other franchises by for example John Sheppard or Malcolm Reynolds, to name only two), but a extraordinary inteligent Irishman with the habit of being demoted for insubordination and insulting supperior officers (by book five most of those officers have learnt to go out of his way), and a certain female character whos real importance wont be revealed until the end of book two.
All in all the series is perfect for anyone who, like myself, has not only been adicted to any novel concerning brave fighers for justice, such as Robin Hood, Ivanhoe, Zorro and The Three Musqueteers, but also has a love for Science-Fiction, time travel and theorizing about how the latter might affect the flow of time. Even the German translation is readable, although the translator at times seems to be unsure wether to use the German or the English wording, especially when concerned with the characters' ranks, constantly switching back and forth between both, and sometimes does translate English phrases a little too literally, throwing them out of context, which then makes reading a little awkward.


Now that I am finally through all of those books, one of three boards of my need-to-read shelf is, for now empty and I have to concern myself with the question of what to read next. As I am currently at home, and won't be back for the next two weeks, I have decided to pick out a few of those long neglected books still lingering unread in the rather strange collection on the book shelf in my old room, namely the Star Wars - Young Jedi Knights series, which I have come by in the same way as the first and third of the Time Wars books. I own three of those, and have picked them now in part because they are written, among others, by Kevin J. Anderson, a writer whose style I have already approved of in other Star Wars novels. However before I will be able to start reading them I will first have to do some research, in order to find the right order of these books, obviously part of a larger series, and if neccessary, acquire the first parts.
And also, before I will come back to more recent Science-Fiction, I have to admit that first I have to come back to one of the founders of the genre, and it is with great shame that I admit that the English version one of Jules Vernes classics, Around the World in Eighty Days, has already been lying unread in a corner of my bookshelf for some years. That I now wish to change, and so this is the book I will pick up now, staying closer for now, to the time of Sherlock Holmes, although the adventures to come are a little too fantastic to be to his liking.

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