Beat to Quarters

After watching Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan with my brother Simon, I naturally looked the thing up on the tvtropes.org. Once there, I discovered that the director was pretty awesome. For one thing, he apparently had a 12 day limit to create the script that got approved for the whole thing to happen (part of which was done by piecing together from the scripts that had already failed to pass muster, but because of this act of piecing the dude didn't get a writers credit- boo). Well, HIS script got approved. Additionally, it said that in a meeting with the Paramount bigwigs, who asked if he could make a movie for "LESS THAN 49 MILLION !@#$% DOLLARS!", his response was "where I come from, you can make 9 movies with that amount." (I think it was 49 million they said, maybe it was 43. The point is they were upset by how much the first Star Trek movie cost while also sucking hard and not making the cash back.)

So this is a cool dude.

A final wrinkle is that this guy, the director for Star Trek II, acclaimed as THE definitive Trek movie, hadn't actually seen Star Trek at that point. To figure out what the deal was, he sat down and watched the entire series thus far (remember The Next Generation didn't exist at this point) and said, "oh. So it's Horatio Hornblower. IN SPACE."

This last comment necessitated a read of this Horatio Hornblower, with Beat to Quarters as the first book written in the series, though not the first chronological book story-wise. I guess the author, C.S. Forester, ended up writing prequel books before the term "prequel" was invented.

So I read it, and it was awesome! Granted, certain technical terms went over my head- and this book was chock full of seamanship technical terms, but the gist in such times is basically "power to engines/weapons/sensors etc. etc.". That's right, I read the whole thing in my mind constantly comparing things to Star Trek. That was fun for me.

Captain Hornblower himself is this fantastic navy guy (the book is set during the Napoleonic wars, which puts it at 1803-1815 according to a quick google search of Napoleonic Wars) who is really neurotic about his self image. He has very little faith in himself, and because of that he's always pushing himself to greater and greater heights just to be worthy of leading a ship. He goes on an "away mission" by himself to meet with this mad rebel leader the English wanted to team-up with against the Spanish, total Kirk move, but the degree of discipline he uses to not say something about some dudes he saw being strung up to die was a total Picard manoeuver (you know you're a Trekkie when you saw what I just did there).

At 270-ish pages in rather large print, it's not really a long book to get through, but it's so engrossing that you blow through it even faster than what that large print business would indicate. I'm definitely looking forward to the next book, though it'll be a while to get to it, I have a bunch of other stuff to read first.

This is poor article writing, but one last note. The narration of the book is so entirely focused on Hornblower's perception of things and his reactions, the book really takes advantage of the novels ability to take it's action from the goings on of a mind, that it's always a surprise to be reminded that it isn't written in first person. Instead, it's an omniscient narrator that can occasionally jump out to some other revealing event, the biggest and most heartwarming example being when we jump to a conversation between the first mate Bush and an unexpected passenger, Lady Barbara, about their ideas concerning Hornblower. Theirs is a very different experience of the man to the one he has of himself, and the truth certainly lies somewhere in the middle.