We all have our favorite TV shows which we love, the shows we grew up with, the shows we quote endlessly and the shows we collect on DVD. But there are the other shows, promising Science Fiction television series that might have been but were rapidly cut short just as they were getting started. This is dedicated to them.

1. Earth 2

Long before there was Lost, there was Earth 2, a series that shared much in common with Lost, a journey that ended in a crash landing in a mysterious place, individualistic survivors struggling to get along and a hidden agenda among their ranks and a conspiracy that is behind their presence here and is tied to the secret of the mysterious planet. Unlike Lost however, Earth 2’s explicitly Science Fiction elements never resonated with audiences and its pairing with SeaQuest did not bring it the viewers that Earth 2 needed to survive. Despite the vigorous fan campaign which TV Guide noted at the time, Earth 2 was cancelled.

Five Prematurely Cancelled Science Fiction TV Shows

Gambling shouldn’t be a gamble. A gamble may be a venture but it shouldn’t be a foolish one. A true gambler knows the odds and knows where to find the action and where to drop the dough. With the advent of the internet, the web is full of betting opportunities and lots of sites promising you action and twice that many scams, rip offs and slow lanes. That’s where Sportbook Watch comes in. Sportsbook Watch is your own personal guide to gambling online giving you the Top gambling reviews and recommendations and telling it like it is. Think of Sportsbook Watch at that guy named Louie who knows all the angles and is doing you a favor by clueing you in. In five languages, including english, in up to the minute updates of sporting lines and odds and free betting ebooks that can give you a real education, Sportsbook Watch shows you around the betting action online, from sports including NFL, NBA and Baseball sportsbooks with live sports scores, Sportsbook Watch really delivers. When it comes to making your bet or making your play, Sportsbook Watch is the wise old hand that shows you the way, gives you the rundown and points you in the right direction. Before you bet, bet on Sportsbook Watch to show you the way.

A San Francisco transplant surgeon was charged Monday with prescribing overdoses of medication to speed up the death of a man at a San Luis Obispo hospital and harvest his organs.

Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, 33, prescribed excessive amounts of morphine and Ativan and injected the topical antiseptic Betadine into Ruben Navarro’s stomach in February 2006, prosecutors in San Luis Obispo County said. Navarro, 26, who was severely disabled mentally and physically, had suffered respiratory and cardiac arrest and had been taken off life support, authorities said.

Now this is yet another demonstration of why I refuse to be an organ donor. Yes it may seem selfish not to check the card and offer up my organs to whoever needs them but I have spent enough time around doctors, nurses and hospitals to know better. I have seen the speed with which nurses and doctors decide to abandon care for patients they think should just be allowed to die. I have seen “errors” and “mistakes” begin to pile up, care get denied, medical personnel show up late all the while… pushing… pushing and pushing you into just signing a DNR form and getting it over with. And that’s when the patient doesn’t have organs to donate.

Medical science began when men stole fresh cadavers from graves and delivered them to doctors to practice surgery on. These days organs are key and in Europe and America, doctors increasingly get to play medical deity deciding who should live and who should die. No thanks.

Dr. Hootan Roozrokh may be the first doctor in California charged with causing a patient’s death in order to get his organs but that is likely because he was the only one dumb enough to do it so badly as to get caught. Just as euthanasia is a common practice in hospitals which no one really gets charged with except the occasional male nurse who takes it too far, moving some patients along so others can get their organs is just as much a common practice, if not as common.

So no thanks, I avoid hospitals and doctors as much as possible and I’m not going to be an organ donor. Especially not when the euthanasia movement has gained far more ground after the death or murder of Terry Schiavo, a disabled woman abused by her husband, who was successfully transformed into some sort of football between the religious right and liberals, who refused to listen to disabled rights advocates. The doctors may have won the Terry Schiavo case but they lost the lost the public’s trust even more. And cases like this don’t help.

Dedicated to the astronauts who perished in the Columbia disaster, Orbiter is an articulate and passionate call for manned space exploration haunted by the fear that the Columbia disaster would allow those who support theoretical robotic manned exploration to triumph over manned human exploration with a view to expanding beyond earth.

Orbiter is carried along by the passion of writer and artist for the subject matter that projects easily from the pages. The story is more than a series of pages and panels, it is a paean, a love poem to space exploration and to space travel, to starry skies and the men and machines who dare and struggle to hurl themselves up out of this world and into worlds beyond. One of the more extraordinary things about Orbiter is just how weightless it feels, how lightly the story is told and how easily it is rendered. The look and feel of the Orbiter cover suggests something heavy is about to unfold and while what happens has global and even cosmic repercussions, the story drifts along easily, always headed to its final destination with pinpoint accuracy and while it is not by any stretch of the imagination a new story, it is an easily told and wonderful display of love for the cosmic journey of exploration.

Warren Ellis brings the Space Shuttle home in Orbiter

There is something in that glint of pure silver which calls to us as nothing else does. Something about it that beckons as no stocks and bonds and mutual funds ever do. The romance of precious metals like gold and silver call to us and signify real wealth at a purely emotional level beneath and beyond financial and investment calculations but they also represent a profitable investment and a real source of wealth at the business and financial level. The price of silver has been rising making it a better investment than ever. And Monex Deposit Corporation has for three decades specialized in providing precious metals investments by selling and holding on deposit for you, gold and silver in coin and ingot form. When you invest in silver, you are not shelling out money for a few pieces of paper but for valuable honest to goodness treasure the sort that kings waged wars over and pirates looted from the decks of burning ships. With Monex Deposit Corporation, you move beyond investment and into accumulation.

Turning a TV show into a comic is a matter of tricky choices, what model do you follow first of all? Star Trek ran into that headfirst with its comic book adaptations that made the effort at mimicking Star Trek episodes and were invariably dreary. A lot of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics would not have even qualified as episodes, by contrast Buffy the Vampire Slayer The Latest Craze is fairly close to an actual Buffy episode somewhere around Season 2. Unlike most Season 2 episodes there are no true moments of peril or twists but it matches an entirely plausible Buffy episode otherwise and anyone not too familiar with Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes might be forgiven if on hearing the description they decided that they were hearing about an actual Buffy episode they had just happened to have missed.

One of the reasons The Latest Craze is such a plausible episode is that it’s such a close imitation of Bad Eggs mixed with doses of the Ethan Rayne episodes like Band Candy. It is no surprise than that The Latest Craze features a return by Ethan Rayne himself who is running a new sort of shop in Sunnydale. Like Bad Eggs, The Latest Craze begins with Sunnydale’s kids becoming fixated on living objects that have an unhealthy hold on them. In this case The Latest Craze features a neo-Beanie Babies spawn, namely, Hooligans, little demonic figures dressed in a variety of outfits who have become instantly collectible items with Ethan Rayne cashing in by charging high prices for premium models according to social status and then having the hooligans steal valuable property from their owners.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer The Latest Craze

No Godzilla hasn’t visited Japan anytime soon but with Prime Minister Abe’s party getting kicked around royally in the elections, in part because his former Defense Minister had suggested that the atomic bombing of Japan was inevitable and with his Democratic liberal opposition demanding that Japan demand that the US apologize for the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki while the US Congress just passed a resolution calling on Tokyo to apologize for the Korean Comfort Women, WW2 is once again in the headlines and history has the whip hand.

The reality is that most of it is absurd. First of all what Japan did in WW2 was outrageous but the US Congress has no place or business demanding that Japan apologize for it to South Korea. Congress is free to pass resolutions demanding that Japan apologize for Pearl Harbor or for eating US Marines alive in at least one siege… as pointless a gesture as that would be… but is there any sane reason for Congress to get involved in South Korean vs. Japanese bickering? Especially since Japan is actually a solid ally these days, in part because of its terror of North Korean nuclear missiles, while South Korea treats us as the enemy.

Finally those very same women forced into brothels stayed on in those brothels mostly when US troops came to Japan and went on servicing them. Mostly the women had little choice and US Servicemen had little understanding of what was going on or even the ability to tell Korean from Japanese, but it does complicate the situation in a way that Congress has failed to acknowledge and knocks away some of the moral triumphalism from the resolution.

As for Japan’s demands of the US. Japan has never accepted that it was the perpetrator of an unjust war, not only against the US but against its Asian neighbors first and foremost, of which Pearl Harbor was only a consequence of US efforts to stifle Japanese imperialism. Japan has insisted on using the atom bombs to play the victim and nothing can deflect Japan from that. But that is not our problem or our concern. The US should apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki when Japan is prepared to make a full reckoning of its actions and that’s not likely to happen.

Choosing which charity to donate to can often become a triage procedure as you have to pick and choose between not only a variety of worthy charities but worthy causes. Do you help save the earth or help the poor? Do you help inner city children or the whales. Do you help provide loans in Guatemala to working class families or protect rainforests in the Amazon. Charity creates as many demands as it relieves and even if you are a millionaire (and most of us of course are not) there is only so much any of can do for any given cause.

It is nice therefore to see charities that are multipurpose, not in the sense of doing too many things at the same time (as those are often bloated and ungovernable), but in the sense of utilizing their resources strategically so their program benefits the world in more than one way. Dogs for the Deaf is a great example of such a program. Dogs for the Deaf rescues homeless animals, trains them and provides them to the deaf and the severely hearing impaired, compensating for their own hearing deprivation with the ability to alert them in case of trouble or to help out around the house. Dogs for the Deaf is a great program because it provides two benefits, helping both dogs and humans, using dogs from homeless shelters who might otherwise meet a sadder fate and working with hearing impaired people who can really benefit from the help and the companionship.

In Charity Navigator’s profile for Dogs for the Deaf, we can see that 91 percent of monies go to program expenses and only 1.5 percent to administrative expenses. Those are pretty great numbers. And the head’s salary falls below the magic 100,000 number which is also great when you consider that in a low of charities, the expenses of the salaries for charity executives alone consume many many millions of dollars, where six figure salaries have long ago become expected and routine, much as in massive corporations.

This post has been sponsored by Navtej Kohli whose Tej Kohli Foundation has been engaging in philanthropy around the world. You can read more about Navtej Kohli at his blog.

There’s no smell like the stench of industry desperation. Call it Eau De’Frantike

Rockstar Games, the premium content development division of game publisher Take Two Interactive Software, Inc., will soon load Sony’s PlayStation 3 gaming console with new gaming titles, as per the news on the official US PlayStation blog on Friday.

In the blog, Michael Shorrock, director of third party relations at Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA), wrote that Rockstar Games, best known as the makers of ‘Grand Theft Auto’ series of urban crime games, is creating a new franchise exclusively for the PS3. However, he didn’t mention the name of the titles.

You have to wonder who is more desperate here. Sony which has slashed prices on the PS3 and is scrambling for a way to survive when it’s coming in third in the console gaming marketplace or Rockstar Games which has seen investigations, seen Manhunt 2 quashed completely and its games in free fall since the GTA San Andreas Hot Coffee debacle when Rockstar Games had been riding so high it seemed like they could do no wrong. Oh no doubt GTA4 will be a huge tremendous hit for Rockstar Games but here’s the desperate part, since when can Rockstar Games create successful franchises outside of Grand Theft Auto?

Because at the end of the day Manhunt is as close to anything resembling a successful franchise as Rockstar Games has ever come and even it is a pretty far cry from it, especially considering that the second game is DOA. Rockstar Games has basically been riding the GTA games in all their varied forms for a while now. There’s there’s five games with a number of add ons and PSP exclusives, which is probably where Sony got this idea. The problem is that bringing in people with really one hit under the belt… even if it is a massive hit… to save you is not smart.

Max Payne was a great game but when Rockstar got its hands on Max Payne they killed it. The Warriors was a non-starter. Bully died out of the gate. Rockstar does not have a great track record and this truly is a gaming industry marriage made in utter desperation on both the part of Rockstar Games and Sony. Two sinking ships passing each other in the night.

Fashion can be an adventure, an adventure in appearance. After all is that not what an adventure is all about in the end? Leaving behind who you were and searching and questing for a way to find out who you really are. And beyond fashion is appearance. Many of us are born as ugly ducklings little realizing that we are meant to be swans. Many people shop at the fine boutiques of Rodeo Drive but overlook the potential of the Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery Center to transform their potential into reality and begin the adventure in appearance of discovering who they can become. In Los Angeles tummy tuck is a trendy procedure but despite its trendy location and trendy facilities, the Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery Center goes beyond trends to pursue innovative techniques that minimize pain and discomfort and recommend only the surgeries you need and not the ones you don’t. As in Beverly Hills tummy tuck may be in or out but at the Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery Center, patient comfort and safety is always in and that is why more and more people are coming to the Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery Center for a tummy tuck in Los Angeles because the Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery Center insures a procedure that produces the results patients want and allows them to begin their adventure in appearance that lets them rediscover who they were inside and who they want to be.

Well according to Cinematical, with Harry Potter nearing the end, Warner Brothers is four times as determined to cash in on the Narnia franchise.

Disney’s completely packed panel was about all things Narnia this afternoon, and the biggest piece of news was the fact that they’ll be releasing a new Chronicles of Narnia film every May, starting with Prince Caspian 2008, and continuing through the rest of the seven books.

Only problem is that one faintly wonders how exactly they’re going to handle Prince Caspian, which was a nicely racist Narnia book, which told us Muslims were filthy infidels, dangerous and treacherous folk. Now they might just bull through it the way Peter Jackson did with the brown men up on the elephants and the Corsairs and ignore the criticism but Prince Caspian is an entire movie, not a single scene in a movie that nobody but nitpickers analyzed in detail anyway. Knowing Hollywood they’re likely to find some PC way to handle it or avoid any overt sign of racial or religious bigotry by juggling things around racially (I’m surprised they didn’t make the kids multiracial) but then again considering that Walden Media is behind this, I expect they’ll basically stick to the original while toning it down as much as possible.

Now this is not an Adventures of Huck Finn issue. C.S. Lewis was being genuinely racist and bigoted in Prince Caspian. Unlike Lord of the Rings which at least had a historical and complex mythological background for everything, Narnia was a crazy quilt of mismatched legends poorly assembled by C.S. Lewis on a whim. And he bears full responsibility of intention.

When Dr. Frankenstein began building his monster, he went with just the bare bones and left out all the accessories. Had he seriously thought about some accessories like a Sanity Charger or a No Crushing Restraint Brain Bolt, things might have gone very differently. Now while your cell phone probably doesn’t come fitted with an evil brain that’s likely to drive it on a killing rampage, the right accessories can really give it the ability to do some incredible things. And at AccessoryGeeks.com, you can be your cell phone’s very own Dr. Frankenstein and bring it to life with cool accessories like bluetooth headsets that set you free so you don’t feel like you have a Frankensteinesque bolt running through your head and cases, pouches and straps so it has a good home too that leaves you comfortable and feeling unburdened, reception boosters so your conversations don’t sound like they’re being interrupted by the monsters of static and protective plastic cases that will protect your phone from anything up to and including monster attacks. And AccessoryGeeks.com has accessories for all the top brands and all the top phones including the hot Motorola KRZR and the Nokia 6086 and the Samsung T409 so you can geek out your phone and turn it into a real monster. Don’t wait for lightning to strike, just click on over to AccessoryGeeks.com for great accessories for your iPod and cell phone and feel the power.

Admittedly I had and still have my reservations about Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd. For one thing it reminded me too much of the disastrous modern relaunch of Sweeney Todd which was all wrong. I suspected that Tim Burton would prefer the original take but even so Johnny Depp’s ability to actually take on a more mature role, when let’s face it, like most teen idols from the 80’s on, he still halfway looks 16, was debatable. At the end of the day Johnny Depp does his best to compensate for his appearance by adopting increasingly eccentric performances. He should never have been able to pull off a pirate Captain but he managed it in Pirates of the Caribbean by turning in a performance so outlandishly bizarre that you were mainly paying attention to his exaggerated tics and mannerisms, which produced a kind of shadow puppet which you could almost forget was inhabited by a man.

The irony is that Johnny Depp’s career really began with 21 Jump Street with the premise that he was a babyfaced cop whom the suspects wouldn’t take seriously resulting in injuries and assaults and forcing him to be transferred to a special task force that sent young looking cops to infiltrate high schools and such. Now in his 40’s Johnny Depp still doesn’t quite pass for more serious adult parts. That’s why his take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory brought up memories of Michael Jackson. The combination of a youthful face that’s almost plastic combined with lots of makeup.

But I do have to say that the poster for Sweeney Todd is fairly convincing. Now the whole thing may be simply artwork but if the movie actually looked like that, it would be very cool. And Johnny Depp looks broad, sunken, an aged and weary man hearing the echoing voices of his own demons pinging back and forth through his own skull. It’s interesting and full of potential.

When you need emergency evacuation or transportation by air, the right air ambulance can make the difference between a simple and professionally handled evacuation and the ride from hell and even between life and death. AeroCare’s air ambulance service is that right choice. An air ambulance evacuation is not a pleasant even or experience in and of itself but AeroCare’s professionally trained staff can insure that in the process they will minimize the stress that you experience and maximize your comfort and safety. Whether the situation is that of an emergency evacuation or a normal routine medical air transport, AeroCare brings the same professional standards to insure your comfort and care while in the air and while landing and taking off. There are air ambulance services that cost more than AeroCare but none that beat its level of service and attention to detail. There are medivac services that cost less than AeroCare but none of them come even close to their commitment to a quality of care that centers on the patient first. When you find yourself in need of an air medical evacuation or medical air transport service, choose AeroCare.

Well the line between professional and fan based efforts to do Star Trek blurs a little further with the new episode starring George Takei as Sulu. Of course New Voyages has already done an episode with Walter Koenig as Chekhov. This appears to be an episode set at the end of the Star Trek TOS movies timeline based on the photo. It also claims to boast professional makeup personnel, storyboarding and special effects. But those have never been New Voyages’ biggest problems. Anyone can forgive poor effects and even direction in favor of good acting, something Star Trek New Voyages has never been within light years of, or even adequate acting. And based on a cast that’s still drawn from the usual New Voyages types, aside from George Takei himself and apparently an actual Broadway actress and Grace Lee Whitney, we’re still going to be stuck with the usual bunch of awkward amateurs woodenly looking ahead and trying to deliver their lines while sounding like a high school production.

Still despite those basic deficits, you have to admire New Voyages for how much they have managed to accomplish. I mean granted second bananas on TV shows often want a chance to shine and that’s been a bug in George Takei’s shorts for some time, even pushing for Star Trek novels that featured his character, but between Marc Scott Zicree it still seems to blend a whole bunch of professional and amateur talent that lets everyone play fan while upgrading the production quality.

Of course the question is who’s paying for it. If the production quality is decent enough and the acting isn’t too embarrassing, this is the sort of thing that Paramount might conceivably pay for at some point, if only to hawk as DVD’s. But it’s far from a sure thing.

We see by the light that reflects off objects and bodies and enters our eyes. Lights radiates down from the sun all around us and nowhere does the light shine more brightly than in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, home of movie stars and some of the most beautiful people on earth. But beauty like the light of the sun is not an exclusive club. It is about how you feel, your attitude and how you recreate yourself, how you reshape the light around you. And when it comes to reshaping your body, no one does it better than the Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery Center. The Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery Center offers excellent los angeles liposuction that can remove fat from the areas where it does not belong and help reshape your body into a new you. Who knew that addition by subtraction could work so well. Truly when it comes to beverly hills liposuction no clinic tops the abilities of the Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery center to use the latest and most sophisticated techniques to safely and artistically upgrade your aesthetic with treatment that has improved the lives and appearances of so many clients of the Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery Center before you. The Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery Center’s pioneering beverly hills liposculpture techniques has created a new look and a new life for a new you. When simply hiding the problem with clothes and loud jewelry does not work. When you need more than just a touch of makeup, the plastic surgery services of the Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery Center can reshape your figure so that the light of the sun shines that much brighter around you and what people see is a brighter and slimmer and shapelier form, the form you always wanted and wished you could have.

It took the imprisonment of both of its stars but the Simple Life which had migrated from FOX, Home of the Worst Concepts in Reality TV to E! Home of Anything Remotely Celebrity Related is now done at last. It was a long grueling process that began when Paris Hilton was showed down our throats thanks to the conveniently timed release of her sex tape to the ridiculous Simple Life whose premise involved two obnoxious celebrity wannabes wandering around and making asses of themselves in small town America.

Now who knew that you could imprison reality TV stars to make a Reality TV series go away. Granted we jailed Richard Hatch but too late to stop Survivor. Then again Survivor self-destructed on its own. But not before dragging a large chunk of our attention span down with it. The Apprentice seems to be nearly done too. Maybe somebody can finally send Donald Trump to jail and put an end to that misery, the way jailing Martha Stewart helped kill the Apprentice spinoff. Reality TV has taken a battering and a lot of its stars have gone to prison. Frankly we would be far better off imprisoning the whole bloody lot of them and throwing away the key.

And maybe once we have moved on beyond jailing Reality TV stars, we can move on to jailing the casts of Yes Dear, According to Jim and pretty much every ABC and CBS sitcom involving fat loutish husbands with attractive wives and Charlie Sheen. Oh wait Charlie Sheen is probably in jail all over again.

When it comes to looking your best, there is one place in the United States you go and that is California and in California, there is one place you go and that is Beverly Hills and there is one place in Beverly Hills you go and that is of course Rodeo Drive. When it comes to fashion and the material and dresses you put on your skin, Rodeo Drive has some of the most fashionable boutiques anywhere in the world but when you want to get right down to the skin and beyond skin deep, nobody in the los angeles tummy tuck specialty does a tummy tuck quite like Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery Center and when it comes to beverly hills liposuction, the Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery center remains absolutely in a surgical and treatment class of its own. The advanced surgical techniques of the Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery Center has enabled them go beyond conventional liposuction and into practicing the only true beverly hills liposculpture that can do more than simply suck fat out but with a Michelangeloesque ability, recreates and reshapes the body to accommodate its new shape rather than simply removing the fat and leaving an empty space and a lot of hanging skin where it used to be. That is why Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery Center continues to be the number one port of call to those committed to a brand of fashion that goes beyond and beneath the skin. Clothes may come and go but the human body is always the first and foremost element in looking good and feeling good and whether it is tummy tucks, liposculpture, liposuction or anything that can help you look good and feel good, the best way is to pass by the fashionable boutiques of Rodeo Drive and go straight to the Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery center to get yourself a body to go inside those clothes.

In the “It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Guy” department, the FBI and the IRS is searching Senator Ted Stevens’ home. Yes that Senator Ted Stevens, 230 million dollar Bridge to Nowhere Senator Ted Stevens. According to news reports,

The Justice Department has been looking into the seven-term senator’s relationship with a wealthy contractor as part of a public corruption investigation.

Yeah I’m shocked. The Senator who threatened to freeze the budget if he didn’t get a quarter of a billion dumped on his Bridge to Nowhere having a dirty relationship with a wealthy contractor. That’s like John Gotti having mob ties. Granted I never thought the day would actually come and the media is of course only gloating about it because Ted Stevens happens to be a Republican. Had he been a Democrat at this point he could be kickboxing babies and you still couldn’t get the media to notice. But we’ll take what we can get.

Senator Ted Stevens has thoroughly embarrassed himself and the people of Alaska with the Bridge to Nowhere, the whole Tubes argument over Network Neutrality. He’s been a longtime friend of pork in a barrel and he’s made himself very rich doing it. Now it’s past time for Senator Stevens to resign and leave with some dignity, because the longer he stays, the better odds are that his drama queen days will lead him to leaving in handcuffs.

Bye Bye Ted.

Karen Traviss is best known for her Star Wars Expanded Universe merchandising novels but the Wess’har novels best reflect her concerns in what might be called the genre of Environmentalist Science Fiction. And like the previous Wess’har novels, Matriarch is heavily concerned with ecology and planetary environments as the center of everything. This is a far cry from the usual sort of Science Fiction novels where planets are terraformed and humans expanded throughout the stars. This is more the sort of novels that walk a step beyond even Ursula LeGuin to regard humans as basically brutish and uncivilized and a menace to the stars. That leads to some rather awkward science and an awkward future because ultimately Karen Traviss is far more interested in commenting on the present day than the future.

That is nothing something that can be said about Eddie who wanders apathetically through interstellar events and Shan Franklin who broods and stews. Shan Franklin, is essentially a bully’s fantasy, the sort of self-righteous character capable of doing anything which writers create to beat up all the other characters morally inferior to them, which proves that a female writer is equally capable of generating such a bully’s fantasy as a male one. Yet in Matriarch, Lindsay and Mohan Rayat emerge as the characters worth reading about. As Lindsay finally becomes the Matriarch, the final matriarch of the several matriarchs in the novel, Matriarch, she represents the only plot twist in the novel. But in her case it is a title she only has the right to because as flawed as her decisions may be, she does what she does out of a genuine concern for others. By contrast Shan Franklin is a Matriarch simply through force of personality with a generalized loathing for the rest of the universe. The Matriarch of the Eqbas Vorhi is simply doing a duty she wants to end as quickly as possible and has no concern for the lives she takes in the process, including those of the people she is supposed to be helping. Ironically it is Lindsay who emerges as the only character who cares about people rather than mere ideology and environmental principles.

Karen Traviss brings us the Matriarch