We interrupt your regularly scheduled mother of all SWTOR reviews...

I'll get back to it tomorrow. In the meantime, I've been out of town, enjoying the Emerald Coast this last week. If you have never been to the Emerald Coast, I recommend it. Especially if you are, like me, an ethnic Southerner. It's been many years now that I've felt like a foreigner in my own country. There's two reasons for this: 1) America has been flooded with foreigners, especially uncouth Third Worlders with extremely uncouth behavior, and 2) I've been living up in Yankeeville, and even the Americans feel like foreigners to me up here. After more than twenty years, I'm still surprised on an almost daily basis by something that somebody does or says. 

I did not feel like a foreigner on the Emerald Coast. I hardly even saw any foreigners. One or two families of vacationing Hindis and one or two families of vacationing Mexicans and a British guy with an American wife. I think that's about it. I also hardly saw any Yankees. Most of the people there were from Georgia or Alabama or were locals from Florida. And the western panhandle of Florida is basically the same as Alabama or Georgia but with better beaches.

Normally, my yardstick for beach quality has to include wave height, and I'll freely admit that by that standard, the Emerald Coast isn't all that great. But the water is incredibly clean and clear, the sand is the best sand I've ever seen, and honestly, it was late enough in the year that it was a little too cold to do much swimming anyway. I enjoyed the beach the way my wife enjoys it; by just sitting in the sun, cracking open a water bottle every so often and mumbling some comment to my wife about something or other, laughing at seeing other people's Southerner, often blond, good-looking kids, who reminded us of our own from years past, as they played near us and were generally attractive and good looking families, and watching wildlife in the Gulf, including breaching fairly small devilfish and some distant dolphins. It wasn't the kind of beach vacation that I'm used to, but it was one that I enjoyed.

While there, I read three books, Planet of Peril by Otis Adalbert Kline, Godborn by Dan Davis, and Space Viking by H. Beam Piper. The third one is the one that caught my attention in a particular way. I'd never read any Piper before, but obviously his is a name that you hear if you're a science fiction fan. (To be fair, I'm much more of a fantasy fan. Which is why I haven't read some classic science fiction even now, sometimes.) One thing that surprised me (which no doubt surprises very few others) is that the Sword Worlds were obviously invented by Piper. When I saw the Sword Worlds in the Spinward Marches of the Traveller setting, I assumed that the Traveller people made them up. They didn't. I don't pretend to know a ton about the Sword Worlds in Traveller necessarily, but from what I do know, it seems hardly anything in the Traveller version of the idea didn't already exist in the Piper version of the Sword Worlds. 

Another surprise was the frequent mentions of a world called Hoth, which clearly George Lucas didn't invent either. Now, I don't know that Piper's Hoth is a frozen world. Nothing suggests that; rather, it's mentioned several times in an offhand way as a space Viking world. 

Space Viking is an interesting story in part because of its political discussions. There's an extended discussion, sometimes buried in other pursuits of the novel, about civilization, how to civilize, and how civilizations get decivilized. The long discussion about the planet Marduk and its civilization is one that many will recognize in Western Civilization today. Piper himself kept trying to compare what was happening overtly to Hitler, but it really feels more like the barbarism of the Left having taken over civilization than it does Nazism. Not that the story is a detailed discussion of the rise of the Fake Hitler character, but from what little it does mention, little of it seems specifically Nazi. And I've read some pretty detailed accounts of the rise of the Nazis, including Shirer's classic work (which misses some pretty obvious stuff in hindsight, in spite of it's "classicness.") No, a reader from today reading it isn't going to be reminded of Hitler. He's going to be reminded of the Democrats, and painfully, of the Republican Establishment.

When Trask, the main character, remarks sadly to his friends on Marduk—at a point where they aren't yet ready to accept this fact, although they are forced to later on—that their nice civilization is already finished, because they've already let the barbarians run amok inside the gates, that's a painfully obvious parallel to what has happened to us already too. And just like the nice Mardukians are mostly in denial of that, most Americans are as well even today, but the die has already been cast. What will come is inevitable now. And even if it could somehow be stopped, averted, or at least mitigated, which I doubt, there's no political will to do so, because most people are in denial about what is inevitably coming.

But people used to know it. H. Beam Piper talked about it at length in, what: 1962 and 1963, when this novel was serialized in Analog? In 1962 many of the inevitable problems in America hadn't even started yet. 1962 was a wonderful year. A magical year, in many ways. Frankie Avalon's Beach Party came out in 1963. Surfin' Safari came out in 1962, and the next three classic Beach Boys albums came out in 1963. I'd love to have been a young man during the time Space Viking was published. But I missed it by a generation. That's when my dad was a teenager. I had to have the late 80s, which—to be fair—was a pretty cool time to be a teenager too. But little did we know; America was about to be irrevocably changed for the worse.

Anyway, enough melancholy maundering. Tomorrow I'll continue the Mother of All SWTOR reviews series by talking about at least half of the Empire side class stories. Maybe both halves, if I have time.