off to Japan!

You know, a measly month doesn't seem like adequate recompense for 18 long months overseas. I mean, Korea ain't the gulag. Far from it. (It's the lime, turkey, bourbon and Mexican food gulag, but that's it.) But I forgot how easy and comfortable it is to live in one's own country, and how much I missed my folks. Now I'm staring down another 18 months in the LTBMF gulag before I can get back to it all.

That being said...I accomplished a lot this month.

Reunion with my extended family at a lake resort in Iowa? Check.

Eating the hell out of my favorite foods, including fleisch salad sandwiches (my favorite food in the whole Universe)? Check.

Reminding my mum and dad what I look like? Check.

Visiting my old haunts, like Victoria Gardens and Barnes & Noble and Total Wine & More (where I picked up a nice bottle of Hendrick's gin, lovely stuff)? Check.

Driving a convertible under a gorgeous California sunset while wearing a Hawaiian shirt and listening to Led Zeppelin on the radio? Check.

Shooting every gun I own? Check. (Dad and I are going trapshooting tomorrow, so we'll get the shotgun knocked off the list. Leave no gun unfired, that's my motto.)

Flying? Well, no. I'm out of currency. But I did stop by the dinky little Apple Valley Airport and see how everybody was doing. Not much has changed. The same old planes are parked out on the flight line, the same grey heads are chatting in the flight school, and so forth. Somebody's 18-year-old son is a flight instructor now. Jeez.

The only things I haven't done, in fact, would be eating at my favorite burger joint (that's also happening tomorrow) and finding my novel notes. I located my Bowie knife, my binoculars and my violin, but I'll be danged if I can find my piles of notes. I must have hid them so well that even I can't find 'em. Oh well. The outlines and prewriting are easy to forsake—as Stephen King would say, they probably aren't worth a tin shit anyway—but there were some lyrical snippets of dialogue in there, plus a few meritorious vignettes. I guess I'll just have to wing it until I come back to the States for good and unpack all those boxes.

Well, this is it. We're down to the wire. I leave on Monday. I'll lose a day traveling west (go jump in a lake, Phileas Fogg) and arrive in Tokyo on the 30th. I'll kick around town on the 31st—the Sumida River cruise, the Imperial Gardens—until Miss H and Miss J get in from Seoul in the afternoon. Then it's DISNEYLAND on the first of August. After H & J go home on the 2nd, I'll journey down through central and southern Japan in the shinkansen (bullet train), taking in Mount Fuji and Lake Biwa. I'll tour Kyoto for two days, petting monkeys and drooling over gold-plated buildings, then hop the train again for Kumamoto on the isle of Kyushu, spending the next 48 hours meditating in Reigando Cave and finding out who's buried in Miyamoto Musashi's tomb. Then it's to Fukuoka and the high-speed ferry to Busan, South Korea.

One of the other cool things about Kumamoto is that it's where Eiichiro Oda lives. He's the guy who writes and illustrates One Piece, my favorite manga/anime. It rather heavily influenced my magnum opus...

After that? For the month of August (school doesn't start up again until September), I was planning on finishing Novel #3, e-publishing Novel #2, and polishing Novel #1. Not to mention learning functional Korean. I really ought to be able to have a decent conversation by now instead of fumbling along like some chuckle-headed tourist.

There's also a humor site I'm writing regularly for now: Rabble Rouse the World. Check it out if you have the time. Ribald jests and laugh-tastic memes abound upon that literary pirate ship. Come aboard, mateys. Arrrrrrr.

I also intend to spend some of August finding all those charming Korean nooks and crannies that I haven't explored yet: Gangwon-do, for example, where the mountains and lakes and rocky beaches are. I just acquired a Canon EOS Rebel T3i, and after a bit of fiddling I'm sure I'll be a master photographer with it. So there ought to be gorgeous pictures of Japan, Korea, and environs pouring into this here blog come mid-August.

Stay tuned. You're in the front-row seat. You can't leave just when it's getting good!

ain't no shame in YA

I used to have this thing about young adult literature, or YA for short. I thought it was...well, for kids. "Young adults" means kids, right?

As I outgrew book series like Goosebumps and Animorphs and moved on to the heavy hitters like Notes from Underground and Moby-Dick (getting tired of hearing about that one yet?), I instinctively sensed that I was "too old" to venture back down the trail and revisit old classics—or discover new ones.

One of the few exceptions to this rule was the Harry Potter series. I got in on the ground floor, as it were: Sorcerer's Stone came out in the U.S.A. in 1998. It took a year for word to spread to my family that this book was the living shizz. My mother originally picked up for my brother to read, but he wasn't interested. I happened to notice it on the coffee table one day in early 1999, when I was 12 years old, just a year older than Harry. I read it and was enthralled. For about three years afterward, Harry and I were practically the same age: Chamber of Secrets came out in June of 1999 (I was still twelve); Prisoner of Azkaban in September 1999, just before my 13th birthday; and Goblet of Fire appeared in July of 2000, two months before my 14th birthday. After that the age gap began to widen, but for a few short years Harry and I shared some kind of age-related bond. And it was magical, let me tell you. I was totally unashamed to be seen reading Deathly Hallows in 2007 at the age of 20.

But even if I had been, I would have soon been cured, for everywhere I looked I saw people twice my age reading it. The big wake-up call came during a visit to the doctor's office, where a large, curly-haired, middle-aged woman in a shapeless blue dress was sitting in the waiting room, riveted by the same orange volume I myself had just finished reading. Another telegram came in when my mother bought me Stephen King's book On Writing. In its pages I discovered that even my favorite contemporary horror writer loved reading the "Potter" series, and had included some shout-outs to it in his own works.

Despite this, somewhere between my twenty-first birthday and my twenty-sixth, I became leery of young adult literature again. Kid stuff, I couldn't help thinking. Yeah, I'm sure it's got literary merit. I'll bet the plot and pacing are second to none. The writing likely kicks ass.

But something always held me back. I'd see the "YA" label on a book on Amazon or in Barnes & Noble, and I'd click away or put it back on the shelf. This prejudice even extended to fellow human beings: I'd be reading someone's blog and liking it, but then I'd check their biography and see that they were a writer of YA. I'd promptly get turned off and leave. Cripes, you'd think I was insecure about my manhood or something.

Well, I'm here to tell you today about two books that changed my outlook: Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve and Airborn by Kenneth Oppel.

You might remember 'em from my last book-related post. Mortal Engines is the first book of the Predator Cities series (known inexplicably as the Hungry City Chronicles in America). Basically, the world's become a wasteland following some kind of nuclear holocaust, and in the wake of this disaster some enterprising fellow put the city of London on gigantic tank treads and gave it humongous steel jaws and decreed that cities should roam all over the planet's surface eating and assimilating each other for spare parts and fuel. Thus the system of Municipal Darwinism was born. Every city and town and village became a mobile eating-machine and started chasing each other around like Pac-Man.

Tom Natsworthy, a 15-year-old apprentice historian and Londoner, is on punishment duty in the Gut—London's hellish underbelly where her prizes are pulled apart and fed to the boilers. Unexpectedly, though, Tom has gotten to meet his hero, Thaddeus Valentine, a renowned master historian. As the scruffy survivors of London's latest catch are processed, one of them draws a knife and makes an attempt on Valentine's life. Tom prevents the ragged captive from stabbing his hero, and in the ensuing struggle both he and the would-be assassin fall out of London's bowels and into the Out-Country, the ravaged remains of Earth's surface. Tom learns that Valentine's attacker is Hester Shaw, a teenage girl with a horribly scarred face, who blames Valentine for her disfigurement and for murdering her mother. During their ensuing adventures, Tom must adjust to a great many things: the savage lifestyle of the Out-Country, Hester's brutal and standoffish nature, the Anti-Traction League (a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of London and every moving city like it), and the unsettling evidence that Thaddeus Valentine may not be such a hero after all.  

Awesome, right?

Airborn follows Matt Cruse, also fifteen and a cabin boy on the grand passenger airship Aurora. During the course of the novel, the Aurora is caught in a storm, boarded by pirates, stranded on an uncharted island, and very nearly destroyed. All this is rather traumatic for poor Matt, who loves the airship more than anything in the world, for his father served (and died) aboard her. Complicating Matt's comfy existence aboard his floating home is Kate de Vries, a wealthy heiress and amateur zoologist who is out to prove that her balloonist grandfather was not crazy when he claimed to have discovered an unknown species of flying creature on his final voyage. She and a reluctant Matt have a series of whirlwind adventures on land and in the air, surviving storms, ducking pirates and meeting the ferocious cloud cats—the "beautiful creatures" that Kate's grandfather spoke of with his dying breath.

Even more awesome, right? 

I don't even care that these are both technically YA works. The writing's good. The characters are vivid. And the imaginations of these two authors are off the flippin' chain. (Reeve, in particular, makes a bunch of obscure pop culture and literary references, most of which I get. It's like I'm receiving a direct geek-to-geek call!) Labels like "young adult" don't matter to me, not now. These are the first works I've really gotten lost in since Harry Potter. It's nice to have rediscovered that feeling. Getting lost in a book is the best thing in the world. You feel like you've taken a running leap off a diving board and submerged yourself wholeheartedly into a vast unexplored ocean, a galaxy of new worlds and new horizons.

The next book in the Mortal Engines quartet is Predator's Gold.

Next up in the Airborn series is Skybreaker.

Gad, don't those titles give you the chills?

Excuse me, I have some new worlds to explore. Turn off the lights when you leave.

SF reading wish-list

You know the story. No matter how many books you devour in a year, it seems like you wind up with a to-read list that's twice as long. For every book you read, two or three more rise up to take its place. This literary Lernaean Hydra has been plaguing me lately. I don't know what's going on. Maybe it's because I've gotten back into reading for pleasure now that I'm in Korea and working the afternoon shift.  Or it could be that I've decided to take a more proactive approach to my craft. Perhaps I just spend too much time on TV Tropes.

Whatever the reason, I'm going to share with you some of the titles on my reading list. Some of 'em are classics, as usual; and some of them are little-known series which deserve more love. If you're interested in seeing what's out there in the world of SF, both old and new, give the following litany your perusal.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Once again demonstrating his genius for creating credible and deeply speculative SF (with historical context), Asimov created the Foundation series, which went on to critical acclaim. The main character, Hari Seldon, is the creator of an esoteric school of mathematics called psychohistory, which draws upon the law of mass action to effectively predict the future on a large scale. Using his research, Seldon foresees the imminent collapse of the Galactic Empire, Seldon creates the "Foundation"—a hidden enclave at the end of the galaxy where all humanity's accumulated knowledge is stored. The series documents Seldon's struggle to establish the Foundation and the attempts by the remnants of humanity to reestablish the Empire according to "the Seldon Plan."

I picked up a few books in the series for a few thousand won from an outgoing English teacher. I figured I'd give it a read...even though Asimov's I, Robot is still sitting unread in a box back in my closet in California!

Airborn by Kenneth Oppel

Matt Cruse is a 15-year-old cabin boy working on the airship Aurora. One day the Aurora encounters a drifting zeppelin with a mysterious old man mumbling about "beautiful creatures," who dies shortly thereafter. A year later, the Aurora is brought down on a tropical island by air pirates, where Matt and the wealthy Kate de Vries discover the truth of the old man's maundering.

This is another series I heard about by clicking around on TV Tropes. I know absolutely nothing about these books, except that Adam Young likes them. I've always been a fan of aviation in general. But something about those tales of weird aircraft and zeppelins and air pirates (particularly in the context of steam punk and alternate history) sets my imagination on fire. The Airborn series has an added twist: strange creatures and scientific discovery. What could be more awesome?

Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve


It's a grim dystopian future. The Earth's crust has been ravaged by a horrific war. Human cities are no longer sedentary, but are mounted upon gigantic treads which roll about the cracked, blasted surface of Planet Earth. More horrific yet, these "Traction Cities" devour each other with huge mechanical jaws to gain precious resources. It's a dog-eat-dog world, and the outlook is pretty bleak. Throw in Earth's ancient technology, a few long-lost superweapons and a load of characters and you have a pretty decent story, if a rather dark one.

I know next to nothing about this series, but can't wait to get into it. Cities rolling about on giant caterpillar treads is something that's fascinated me ever since I saw the film John Carter (based on Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series). The Mortal Engines series has garnered quite a lot of (positive) critical attention, so at the very least it won't be a boring read, right? 

Midnight at the Well of Souls by Jack L. Chalker

This series edges farther toward fantasy than I'm usually comfortable with. The concept is convoluted, so bear with me. In the first book, we've got your typical space freighter, the Stehekin, captained by one Nathan Brazil. There's a bunch of other people on board, too. They get a distress signal from a planet called Dalgonia, where there's an archaeological team doing some research on the long-dead Markovian race which once lived there. The Markovians were known for building planet-sized computers with which they attempted to fathom the secrets of the universe. Upon arriving, they discovered one of the archaeologists, Elkinos Skander, has murdered the others and disappeared. Tracking him to one of Dalgonia's poles, the crew of the Stehekin are sucked into the Well World, which is divided into "hexes," each hex being subject to different rules, laws, and inhabited by a different race. But here's the catch: entry into one of the hexes means that the person entering is transformed into the race native to that hex. One by one the crew members change into exotic alien forms; in these new bodies they must solve the mystery of the Well World, find out how to stop Skander and turn themselves back into humans. And Nathan Brazil discovers something extraordinary about himself, too.

Weird, right? So weird I feel like I have to read it. I just want to see how the team gets transformed, and what they all morph into. Call it morbid fascination. Chalker himself was quite taken with bodily transformations as well; the rest of the Well World series and quite a few of his other works deal with it. 

In the Balance (Worldwar, Book One) by Harry Turtledove

In a nutshell...

Smack dab in the middle of World War II, Earth is invaded by the Race, a horde of spacefaring reptilian warriors bent on galactic domination. Both the Allies and the Axis unite in the face of mutual destruction and rise up against the invaders.

I used to hate historical fiction. Then I cautiously read the first book of the Destroyermen series (see below), and I thought, "Hey, this isn't that bad." (Heck, I might even go see Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter this weekend.) I'm something of a World War II buff, so combine that with an alien invasion (in which the human race not only holds its own, but actually fights back successfully in unexpected ways), and you've got a recipe for a fangasm.

Crusade (Destroyermen, Book Two) by Taylor Anderson

Into the Storm, the first book in the Destroyermen series, details the origin of Anderson's world and characters. The U.S.S. Walker, an aging World War I-era rustbucket of a destroyer under the command of Captain Matthew Reddy, is on the run from the Japanese battlecruiser Amagi. Pressed into service in the desperate first days of World War II, Walker and a half-dozen other worn-out vessels were tasked with defending the Navy's main base in the Philippines. Overrun by a massive assault, Walker and its sister ship Mahan are now fleeing the pursuing Japanese fleet.

That's when a mysterious storm appears out of nowhere, sucks up Mahan and Walker, and dumps them out...well, somewhere else.

The geographical features are the same. The coastlines look just as they should, and all the islands and reefs are in place. But Captain Reddy and his crew are startled to see dinosaurs roaming about on shore, and monstrous fish and other creatures swimming in the ocean. Traces of human civilization are nowhere to be found. Reddy's amazement deepens when the Walker runs straight into a battle between two completely inhuman races: the Lemurians, lemur-like humanoids who live on giant floating cities, and the Grik, savage reptiles with insatiable bloodlust. It seems humans never evolved in this world. Reddy's intervention in the otherworldly battle makes the Walker allies of the Lemurians and enemies of the Grik...and things only escalate from there.

In Crusade, the second book of the series, Reddy and his crew learn that Walker and Mahan were not the only ships to fall through the storm and into the new world: the Japanese battlecruiser Amagi made it through as well, and now it's in the clawed hands of the vengeful Grik...

Come on, do I need to explain this one? A parallel Earth? Inhuman races vying for supremacy? A savage world full of strange monsters and ancient beasts? Bamboo technology mixing it up with World War II capital ships? Freakin' humanoid dinosaurs versus freakin' humanoid lemurs? BARs and Springfield rifles? This is just too cool. Taylor Anderson is no William Faulkner, but he writes well enough to illustrate his world and populate it with vivid imagery. I got all the books in the series (so far) at What the Book? in Itaewon last month, and I'm going to start working on them as soon as I finish my Jules Verne kick (The Mysterious Island and Around the World in Eighty Days).

In addition to these sci-fi titles, I've got The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley waiting in the wings.

Oh! The joy of reading!

Listening to:

the Halloween cocktail party

I had a deplorable amount of difficulty coming up with a name for this post. Even now, I'm not entirely satisfied with the result. "Halloween cocktail party" implies that all we drank were Halloween-themed cocktails, which most certainly wasn't true. I could've called it a "costume cocktail party" but that (a) leaves All Hallow's Eve right out of the picture and (b) weakly implies that we only drank costume-themed cocktails, whatever the hell those are. So in the end, I elected to stick the words "Halloween" and "cocktail" into the title somewhere and let the grammar go whistle. Now that we've got the stew sorted from the dumplings, let's get to the meat of the matter. Last Friday I hosted a Halloween cocktail party at my parents' house in Apple Valley, California, in celebration of the upcoming holiday and in recognition of the fact that all of us need to get blind drunk more often. 'Twas a good party. About ten people came, there was nonalcoholic punch (limeade), plenty of cocktails, oodles of snacks (Costco pizza, a fruit bowl, Cheez-Its, Chex mix, Halloween candy, some creative costumes (a few too many girls came dressed as "sexy" somethings; sexy referees, or sexy gun molls, or sexy firefighters...but oh, heck, it's a party), and lots of fellowship and good cheer. I hauled out some Halloween-y drinks, we played games like Taboo and Apples to Apples, there was music on the stereo and Pirates of the Caribbean playing silently on the TV, and it was fun. We all got a little tipsy (except for the designated drivers, of course) and broke up about 1:00 a.m. Now if somebody would only invite me to a party...

recommended reading

Well, things have changed quite a bit since the last installment. I managed to devour Treasure Island in only a few days; it's a page-turner, all right, not to mention being an easy read broken up into short, easily-digestible chapters. I'll review it for you, and give you some insight into my current occupation, Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu.

I'll also give you my final thoughts on 50 Great Short Stories, which, needless to say, I finished before beginning any of this other stuff. It sure didn't seem like fifty stories, but that was only because they went quickly. Some of them weren't more than five pages long, and one (The Foreigner, by Francis Steegmuller) was only one and a half or so. But it was nonetheless powerful for all that. Some of these stories' impacts were really crushing or otherwise impressive or influential.

I think my favorite of the latter half of the book was The Man Who Could Work Miracles by H.G. Wells. Demonstrating all his usual strengths (limitless imagination, mastery of articulate narration, and skill for the vernacular, not to mention a subtle yet wry sense of humor), he tells the tale of a simple man, Mr. Fotheringay, who somehow finds himself with the ability to make miracles happen. With a thought or a word he can Biblically modify or transform any object or circumstance to his will. He first enables an oil lamp to burn upside-down, to the consternation of the crowd at the pub. He then sends the local constable to Hades, but after some more thought he transfers him to San Francisco instead. Eventually he comes under the influences of Mr. Maydig, the head of the local parish, who immediately insists that he and Fotheringay embark on a grand campaign of societal modification, during which they reform all the drunkards in town, change all the alcohol into water, improve the railway communication lines, drain a swamp, and cure the Vicar's wart. The story takes a turn for the worse as the two men, in a kind of breathless ecstasy of do-good, reflect that they haven't the time to accomplish all they wish to in one night. Mr. Maydig unwisely suggests to the uneducated Mr. Fotheringay that he simply stop the planet's rotation until such time as they finish their work, and can let the normal course of time resume; Fotheringay obliges. He collects himself and says to the Earth in general: "Jest stop rotating, will you?"

But Fotheringay neglects to look after the well-being of all the houses, cities, animals, and people standing on Earth's surface (Wells refers to these as "movables"), which at the cessation of the Earth's rotation naturally go flying off the ground in a great cloud at hundreds of miles per hour. (The Earth, as you ought to know, rotates at considerable speed, and if such rotation were to be stopped, the impetus would throw you, me and most of the world's buildings, rocks, trees, animals, and landscape hundreds of miles through the air to certain doom.) Mr. Fotheringay manages to save himself by immediately imposing a miracle ("Let me come down safe and sound."), and only just in time, for his clothes are already beginning to burn from atmospheric friction. He lands in a pile of upturned dirt, in time to witness what seems to be the entire town falling down around him and bursting into wreckage, and vast winds roaring about him with the most tumultuous noise imaginable. Titanic storms spring up, hail rains down, and a mammoth wall of water (no doubt the remains of the oceans, also flung incontinently from their beds) come pouring toward him. Just in time he manages to miracle all this to a halt. He then digs his fingers into the dirt, holding on against the winds, and concentrates long enough to turn everything back the way it was before he did his first miracle. And then...well, I won't spoil the end. Suffice it to say, it's a miraculous story, humorous yet chilling, mind-boggling and believable, perceptive, with a relevant moral, but not preachy. There's a reason Wells is my favorite author of all time.

And so I finished the book, with a real sense of the sublime. One does not delve so quickly (and not superficially) into fifty disparate universes without feeling some after-effects. It was a whirling ride through the macabre, the meaningful, the portentous, the humorous, the tragic and the evocative. I loved almost every minute of it. As trite as this exhortation has become, I highly recommend 50 Great Short Stories (ed. Milton Crane) to anybody.

One of the authors I read in that book was Robert Louis Stevenson. Completely by chance I elected to purchase one his fuller works, Treasure Island. I'd read the abridged version as a child (what a travesty I can now see that to be!) and seen several movie adaptations, all of which were lackluster, if for no other reason than they failed to be faithful to the original work. Treasure Island is an unmitigated masterpiece. It defines the pirate genre, as much as Robert E. Howard's Conan stories defined sword-and-sorcery. It's a splendid story in its own right, and a perfect adventure to get lost in on an afternoon, but it's just plain piratey into the bargain. It's got everything: mysterious blind beggars, old seadogs, sea shanties with ominous meanings, narrow escapes on land, thrilling chases by sea, cutlasses, knives in the dark, black oaths, cloak-and-dagger affairs, cutlasses and pistols, betrayal, exotic islands, castaways, brave captains, bungling aristocrats, hangman's nooses, peg legs, parrots, riggings, trade winds, ships, rowboats, coracles, savages, buccaneers, storms, and just about everything you'd want in a pirate adventure on the high seas and in port towns.

The book itself has intrigue, mystery, some of the most colorful characters imaginable, a strong plot, and its text is anything but prosaic. You can literally feel young Jim Hawkins's terror upon discovering the bloodthirsty scallywags' murderous plot, and his sense of adventure at roaming the high seas to a far-flung, uncharted island in search of treasure. The sense of the unknown and the ominous in the beginning of the book, especially with characters like Billy Bones, Black Dog and Pew, is palpable, savory and real. Stevenson is one of my new favorite authors. You could tell he put his heart and soul into his writings. He himself was a traveler, and his intoxication with pirates and all that's involved with them is more than tangible...you can taste it when you read. I ought to know; I suffer from that same intoxication with pirates, adventure and travel myself. He loves this story he's telling, and he tells it to the hilt. I ask that God send you back to Earth if he discovers, at the Pearly Gates, that you have not read this book...ye scurvy dog.

Perhaps it was a mistake to read a work of nonfiction after such a marvel as Treasure Island, but I thought I'd give Marco Polo a chance at topping Jim Hawkins. Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu is touted as more than a biography of one of the world's most renowned explorers: some of the critics on the dust jacket twitter about the book's closer resemblance to a travelogue or an adventure story. I can see their point, but thus far I'm a bit let down by the book. It's a tad drier than I expected, and slower. I'll grant you the descriptions of travel on the Silk Road, Mongol culture and Venetian economic practices are engrossing, but they're not quite as engrossing as I was hoping.

Perhaps I haven't read far enough. I've only just started Part Two. Part One concerned the travels of Marco's father and uncle to the court of Kublai Khan, being charged by that worthy to return to their homeland, retrieve Papal letters of goodwill, some oil from the Holy Sepulcher, and at least a hundred intelligent craftsmen and merchants for the Khan's service. It took them sixteen years, and in the end, what with delays and their own avarice and all, they only managed to retrieve the papers, the oil and the elder Polo's only son, Marco. The book records the trio's return to the court of the Khan via the Silk Road, and some of the amazing sights and practices they encountered on the way there. I was particularly interested in the accounts of koumiss, the signature alcoholic beverage of the Mongols, made of fermented mare's milk. I think the book will begin to pick up now: no sooner did Marco's father and uncle enter the sight of the Khan (after their years-long absence) than they put young Marco, only just entering manhood, into his service.

Think about that, now. This is in the thirteenth century. Most Venetians (indeed, Europeans) viewed the Mongols, the Mongol Empire, and especially Kublai Khan as savage. They were devils in human form, half-mythic, barbarian conquerors who raped, murdered and pillaged wherever they went. They were so far away they might as well have been on another planet, culturally and geographically. Traveling to those distant lands was a matter of years, not days or even hours as it is today. For a young Venetian to embark on that kind of journey, into the heart of the ancient, wild Eastern empires, and to be entered into the service of the mysterious emperor of a barbaric nation, arguably the most powerful man in the world...it staggers the imagination. In such times, anything could happen. Dreams could come true...and the most agonizing deaths could spring from any quarter. The Khan was unpredictable and temperamental. The Polos would be at the mercy of the Khan's enemies upon his death; there was no way to flee the Empire unnoticed. Danger lurked at every step, both outside of and inside the lands of the Mongols. But Marco Polo lived to return to his homeland, and tell of his many adventures after dwelling for years in the outlying lands. What fortitude, what intrepidity, what adventure...!

Well, maybe this book isn't quite as boring as I let on.