A-to-Z Challenge Day 11: The Letter K

Alanna Kor

The Fateful Lightning

Space Corps Book 2

A major character in The Fateful Lightning is the Danab liaison officer Alanna Kor.  Like Worf in Star Trek, she's an outsider among her own people and her Space Corps work is one long thankless task to find some common ground between her two worlds.  The interesting thing about plotting her course in the story was seeing that she could disappear for long stretches at a time and come back and still make an impact in new and interesting ways.  She's also a big beneficiary of the name upgrades that periodically happen in the notes.  I created her when I was in high school, part of the second set of story notes (although the first book, The Dark Side of Space went through a creative revision much like "The Cage" and "Where No Man Has Gone Before" as pilots of the original Star Trek) that I worked on in the saga.  The Fateful Lightning is all about the long road to peace between the Space Corps and the Danab Empire.  Where Star Trek could always be a little vague and sporadic with the Klingons, never sure if they were that important (this changed in the movies and The Next Generation as well as later in Deep Space Nine, but they always shared the spotlight, and even when they were in cahoots with someone else, as with the Romulans, the relationships were never explicit), I realized that the Danab were central to the entire saga of the Space Corps, and it was thanks to the early role of Alanna Kor and The Fateful Lightning, which reshaped Dark Side of Space again and helped inform what Seven Thunders finally became.

Cassio Jody Kokubo

Yoshimi and the Assassins Guild

Yoshimi Trilogy Volume 2

I've been stressing pretty heavily warrior orphan Yoshimi's whirlwind tour of the world, as well as the specific section that evokes the great novel 2666.  Well, Cassio Jody Kokubo in Rio de Janeiro is how we reach that point.  It's the last stop before Mexico, which is the last stop before Ireland, which is the last stop before England in the concluding volume.  If you've been following me so far, hopefully there's some significance apparent in each stop.  Anyway, the particular significance of Rio happens because of the film Fast Five, as the title suggests the fifth film in the Fast & Furious series, released in 2011.  At the time, I was just starting to write about movies for Examiner (if you care about that, there's more stuff to read here), and so I had a platform to be expansive about my thoughts on them.  I saw the success of the series as an acknowledgment that films have a great chance for success today if they embrace their global market, which this series does.  Rio is the main setting in the film, and to my mind represents one of the world's emerging new major cities.  Kokuba, like most of the members of the Assassins Guild, turns out to be anything but what Yoshimi expected.  He forces her to begin a journey of re-examining her life, which begins to be reflected in the Mexico chapter filled with forced perspective.  Plus he has a cool name, although I cannot lay claim to it.  Maybe sometime I'll tell you where the Guild members got their names from.

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Red Sox lost last night.  Big Papi, finally playing this season, is doing fine, though.  Have no idea who Big Papi is?  I know I haven't talked much about baseball here at Scouring Monk, but perhaps that means you shouldn't be visiting here...

The Angels lost to those dastardly A's again.  Albert Pujols dropped to .300.  Mike Trout dropped to .250.

The Cardinals didn't play.