What Happened

I
I wrapped up all my classes last week with two more weeks to go till the end of the semester. The remaining two weeks are as good as gone, though. Next week the students’ minds will be everywhere but in the classroom with Raya expected on Saturday. The same goes with the week after the break. In fact, some students may not even be on campus until the exam week comes November.

In the meantime, I expect to see a significant increase in the number of students knocking on my office door. There’ll be the regulars, whom I’ll be happy to see. Then, there’ll be some new faces looking to squeeze some juicy exam tips out of me, whom I’ll tolerate. The rest, however, will be those who will come to a belated realization that they are not doing particularly well in the course, coming for “help”.

By “help”, they mean to be given some kind of assignment that will bump up their grades. Since it’s already late in the semester – too late, I’d say, though some will actually come after the final exam – they won’t really expect to be given any ‘real’ assignment but, quite literally, a free pass.

One sorry ass already came on Thursday. A repeating student who is rude, always late, never participated in class discussions, never came for consultation, and never shown any degree of interest in the course materials; I was happy to throw him out of my office. Figuratively, of course, though it would have given me much greater pleasure if I could actually do it.

II
It took me about four days to read Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber, my only sixth book this year! This one I didn’t buy from Amazon, but from MPH at 1 Utama, almost two months ago. A few pages were defaced with a black marker, to my absolute horror. It may not have been MPH’s fault – the book was shrink-wrapped – but it definitely makes me want to stick to Amazon for my next book purchase.

The Terran Federation Navy fought desperately for over forty years, but the ruthless species known as the Gbaba slaughtered the human race’s extra-Solar colonies one by one. Now the end had finally come; Earth herself lay under siege by an enemy humankind could not defeat.

And so mankind undertook one last throw of the dice: Operation Ark. Earth’s final colonizing expedition was meant to build a new civilization, on a planet so distant even the Gbaba might never find it and without the high-tech infrastructure whose emissions might betray its location. To protect and conceal that expedition, the Navy’s final fleet was prepared to die to the last ship. Lieutenant Commander Nimue Alban volunteered to serve on the flagship of that fleet, knowing that she and everyone else aboard it would die... which was exactly what happened.

So she was a little surprised to wake up in a cave on a planet called Safehold. She was even more surprised to discover that she’d been dead for eight centuries... and that the fanatic administrators of Operation Ark had used mind-control techniques to create a false, brutally suppressive religion in which every single Safeholdian believed – one whose entire purpose was to forbid invention and innovation forever.

Everyone on Safehold knew the Church was the consecrated custodian of God’s will. Everyone knew forbidden technology was the work of the Devil. And everyone knew that anyone who dabbled in the forbidden must be destroyed, lest everyone’s soul be lost forever to damnation.

But a tiny faction within Operation Ark’s leadership remembered the truth and believed in human dignity and freedom. They’ve left Nimue Alban to oppose that monstrous creation, and they’ve given her a carefully hidden cache of technology and the capabilities of the android body in which her memories, loves, hopes, and dreams live on. Now it’s her job to somehow provoke the technological progress – and freedom of thought and belief – the Church of God Awaiting has worked centuries to crush.

Nimue Alban spent her entire life fighting against the inevitable destruction of her species. Now she’s about to discover that dying in humanity’s defense was the easy part.

Off Armageddon Reef book jacket

Nimue Alban/Merlin Athrawes reminds me of R Daneel Olivaw.

Six books! I seriously hope to catch up when the semester is over.