Spoilers TOS: Ishmael by Barbara Hambly Review Thread

[DarrenTR1970]

See also the second Kolchak tv-movie, The Night Strangler (1973), which nowadays serves as a nice time capsule of the somewhat seedy, seamy Pioneer Square of the 1970s.

Yeah, recent transplants and even some natives who complain about how seedy downtown Seattle is, either don't know their history or are looking back through rose colored glasses.
Seattle was in rough shape in the seventies and early eighties, what with the thought that Boeing might go bankrupt, be bought out by McDonald Douglas or move production out of state, there wasn't much in the way of optimism and that was reflected in Seattle, Pioneer Square, the waterfront and surrounding areas.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I love Seattle and I vacation there every few years. My hotel (the Courtyard Marriott) is IN Pioneer Square, and - aside from the somewhat large homeless population - the area seems OK.

Although McCoy's Firehouse quit serving breakfasts a couple of years ago, and that REALLY pisses me off because they had GREAT breakfasts there.

And Marcela's is gone too.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

My Seattle hotel of first choice is the Best Western Pioneer Square Hotel (the historic Hotel Yesler). Failing that, I've also stayed at a Choice Hotels property that's within easy walking distance of Seattle Center (the Space Needle has become kind of a "been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and too damned expensive" thing, and even before the restaurant closed, it had ceased to serve much that was of interest to me, at least at a price I was willing to pay, but I always visit the Pacific Science Center).

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I always visit the Pacific Science Center.

I do too, but the damn thing was CLOSED the last time I was there (2022). Not entirely sure why.

As for the Space Needle: The Columbia Center is cheaper and has way better views.

I wonder if Seattle will get a new NBA team now that they have a decent - albeit rather humorously named - arena?

 

[DarrenTR1970]

As for the Space Needle: The Columbia Center is cheaper and has way better views.
I wonder if Seattle will get a new NBA team now that they have a decent - albeit rather humorously named - arena?

I have a friend who works in the Columbia Tower who is always posting views from her office and yes they are incredible.

As for Climate Pledge Arena, the name might sound silly, but I was there last year for Paul McCartney and what the designers did to the interior is really something else. It really lives up to its name as being eco-friendly and there's not a bad sight line in the stadium.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

The grasshoppers at Mariners games are delicious....

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As for Climate Pledge Arena, the name might sound silly, but I was there last year for Paul McCartney and what the designers did to the interior is really something else. It really lives up to its name as being eco-friendly and there's not a bad sight line in the stadium.

Literally the only thing remaining from the old KeyArena is the roof, IIRC. They moved up the roof, demolished the entire arena, built the new one, then put the roof back down. Very impressive.

As for the name? Meh. It's Seattle. That's kind of their thing.

 

[Greg Cox]

I love Seattle and I vacation there every few years. My hotel (the Courtyard Marriott) is IN Pioneer Square, and - aside from the somewhat large homeless population - the area seems OK.

Back in the seventies, the Pike Place Market/Pioneer Square region was pretty much the home of peep shows, XXX-rated theaters, shady "massage" parlors, and hookers. Think Times Square, pre-Giuliani.

Which is very much how it's portrayed in "The Night Strangler," albeit in a suitable-for-TV kinda way.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Have any Trek novels other than Ishmael ran with the idea that Amanda Grayson is from Seattle?

 

[Allyn Gibson]

If the dates in the Wikipedia entry are correct, then Paladin was operating much earlier in San Francisco than previously thought, because 'Ishmael', which is based off the TV series 'Here Comes the Brides' is set in Seattle circa the late 1860s; the novel places the events from September 1867 to December 1867. Historically Asa Mercer made two attempts to bring single women to Seattle in 1864 and 1866. 'Have Gun Will Travel' is set nearly a decade later circa mid to late 1870's.

The radio series is set explicitly in 1875-6. A narrator often opens the episodes with, "San Francisco, 1875, the Carlton hotel, headquarters of the man called 'Paladin.'" And the first year usually remade television episodes, though not in the same order and often reworked significantly to account for the differences of format. A later episode takes place around the events of Little Bighorn, which was in June 1876.

I don't claim to be an expert by any means, but my gut feeling is HGWT is 1870s, and it's contemporaneous with Gunsmoke, because Paladin alludes to knowing Matt Dillon in an early episode. I don't really have a problem saying a season of the show spanned two years -- there are lots of episodes, Paladin goes all over the place (as far east as Kansas!), sometimes where there's no rail and barely any trails, and some episodes eat up significant amounts of time. The only way some episodes even make sense is if Paladin has magic transportation powers because he gets from San Francisco to really remote places reallydamnfast.

Maybe HGWT exists in a place outside of Newtonian space-time.

I don't really have a problem with Paladin active in San Francisco in late 1867, though. The radio program gives him an upper-class Boston background in its finale, and I don't see why that doesn't work for the television Paladin. (The exact details of the story don't, but that's a different issue.) We know Paladin was a Civil War veteran -- cavalry, if I remember correclty -- and he probably mustered out in the summer of 1865. I feel like Paladin was probably early 30s at the end of the war, and he was probably at West Point in the early 1850s, because he knows and has a reputation with a lot of military officers, both active and retired. Given his knowledge of native tribes, his military career was probably spent on the Plains, and during the Civil War he probably saw action exclusively west of the Mississippi.

How he ends up in San Francisco I can't guess. The scene in Ishmael -- it's like two pages -- doesn't negate any of that, and even if HGWT starts in the early 1870s, there's no reason Paladin can't have been in San Francisco in the late 1860s. The series even suggests he was, because he's well established in San Francisco and has made his home at the hotel for a while when the series begins.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

The only way some episodes even make sense is if Paladin has magic transportation powers because he gets from San Francisco to really remote places reallydamnfast.

Perhaps he's an ancestor of Jack Bauer?

 

[Christopher]

The radio series is set explicitly in 1875-6. A narrator often opens the episodes with, "San Francisco, 1875, the Carlton hotel, headquarters of the man called 'Paladin.'" And the first year usually remade television episodes, though not in the same order and often reworked significantly to account for the differences of format. A later episode takes place around the events of Little Bighorn, which was in June 1876.

Whoa. The short-lived Richard Dean Anderson/John DeLancie steampunk Western Legend, co-created by Trek's Michael Piller and airing on UPN the same year Voyager premiered, was set in 1876 and did an episode featuring General Custer a few months before Little Big Horn. I wonder if Ernest Pratt and Janos Bartok ever teamed up with Paladin in some unseen adventure (or someone's crossover fanfic).

I don't claim to be an expert by any means, but my gut feeling is HGWT is 1870s, and it's contemporaneous with Gunsmoke, because Paladin alludes to knowing Matt Dillon in an early episode. I don't really have a problem saying a season of the show spanned two years -- there are lots of episodes, Paladin goes all over the place (as far east as Kansas!), sometimes where there's no rail and barely any trails, and some episodes eat up significant amounts of time. The only way some episodes even make sense is if Paladin has magic transportation powers because he gets from San Francisco to really remote places reallydamnfast.

Maybe HGWT exists in a place outside of Newtonian space-time.

Reminds me of Filmation's Lone Ranger animated series from 1980. It strove to be educational and often featured the Ranger and Tonto encountering real historical figures and events from the Old West... but those events range from the brief run of the Pony Express in 1860-61 to the Oklahoma Land Rush in 1889, while the Ranger, Tonto, and their horses remain ageless and unchanging over this span of nearly three decades (which is not presented in any kind of chronological order). So in the course of teaching history, the show played a bit fast and loose with it.

It also reminds me of Star Trek Lower Decks and its bizarre insistence on claiming that virtually every episode takes place within a single day, no matter how eventful it is or how much denouement and interstellar travel has to unfold between its climax and the closing scene where the characters reflect on their experiences "today."

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Whoa. The short-lived Richard Dean Anderson/John DeLancie steampunk Western Legend, co-created by Trek's Michael Piller and airing on UPN the same year Voyager premiered, was set in 1876 and did an episode featuring General Custer a few months before Little Big Horn. I wonder if Ernest Pratt and Janos Bartok ever teamed up with Paladin in some unseen adventure (or someone's crossover fanfic).

Interesting.

I just went through my OTR mp3s, hoping one of the episodes names would register with me, but alas. (I binged the HGWT and Gunsmoke radio programs in 2020; many issues of Previews that year were written while I was listening to westerns at home.) The episode, as I remember it, has Paladin on business in the Dakotas, and he ends up coming across a deserter from Custer's army who's also being pursued by someone else. The kid deserted because he wanted to marry his girlfriend (Paladin also finds her), and the man who's pursuing the deserter is a homicidal maniac who, unsurprisingly, ends up dead. But Paladin's still like, "I gotta take you in, and it sucks that you're going to hang, but I can't let you go," and then they come across the battlefield and see the incredible slaughter. So Paladin lets him go and tells him to tell people he's a survivor and no one will ever question it.

Edit to Add: The episode is "Comanche." It's actually an adaptation of an episode of the television series, from the second season, and I must've forgotten that. (I also binged the show.) So, that puts at least part of the second season of HGWT in 1876. Both were broadcast in 1959, the television episode on May 16, the radio episode on July 5th.

The HGWT crossover I'd considered, since it also takes place in San Francisco, is William Shatner's short-lived western, Barbary Coast. Wikipedia places it in the 1870s. And there are times Paladin gets involved in some business there...

It wasn't something I realized until I listened to the Wilder podcast this year, but HGWT also overlaps with later books in the Little House series. Paladin could have met the Ingalls while passing through De Smet on business in the Dakotas.

It was that podcast that put the Dakota War in the back of my mind as a possible point in Paladin's pre-HGWT career. Paladin strikes me as someone who might have experienced firsthand the Army's genocide of the Dakota and their expulsion from Minnesota and decided that, nope, that was bullshit.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Whoa. The short-lived Richard Dean Anderson/John DeLancie steampunk Western Legend, co-created by Trek's Michael Piller and airing on UPN the same year Voyager premiered, was set in 1876 and did an episode featuring General Custer a few months before Little Big Horn. I wonder if Ernest Pratt and Janos Bartok ever teamed up with Paladin in some unseen adventure (or someone's crossover fanfic).

I miss Legend. It was a pleasant island in the sea of pure drivel into which television had already degenerated. A Brightspot (yes, that's a Janet Kagan shoutout) in the gloom of all the monuments to Kitman's Law.

 

[Christopher]

I miss Legend. It was a pleasant island in the sea of pure drivel into which television had already degenerated.

As someone who grew up in the '70s-'80s, I can assure you there was no shortage of drivel on TV in those decades. Indeed, prior to ST:TNG, most TV sci-fi was drivel, with rare exceptions like Star Trek, The Incredible Hulk, and Max Headroom. That's why ST:TNG's first season was so well-received despite its bad reputation in retrospect -- because for all its flaws, it was still far above the schlocky norm for 1970s-80s SFTV. Genre television got vastly better starting around 1989, with TNG season 3, Alien Nation, and Quantum Leap, and continued to improve through the '90s, the decade that brought us DS9, Babylon 5, Buffy, Xena, The X-Files, Stargate, Batman: TAS, Gargoyles, X-Men: TAS, and so much more. It's astonishing to me that you'd think the '90s were a low point in television history.

Well, unless you're thinking specifically of UPN, given that Voyager and Legend were just about the only non-drivelly shows in its inaugural 1995-6 broadcast season. VGR was the only show in UPN's debut season that didn't get cancelled, though that was as much due to new execs coming in with a different approach as it was a matter of ratings or quality.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

Have any Trek novels other than Ishmael ran with the idea that Amanda Grayson is from Seattle?

I know @Greg Cox throws in a Pacific Northwest reference into his novels once and while.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Who said I was talking about "genre television"? I was talking about television in general. The late Dr. Karl Haas, in explaining the title of his nationally syndicated radio show, Adventures in Good Music, declared (among other things) that "good" and "bad" are entirely independent of genre. Which is something I would consider an axiom. I would go on to say that good fiction, good drama, good music serve their genres by putting quality ahead of genre, while the bad stuff enslaves itself to genre, doing the genre a grave disservice in the process.

The 1970s and 1980s brought us M*A*S*H. And Barney Miller (the cop show that actual cops tended to deem the most realistic on television). And the Norman Lear sitcoms. And the MTM sitcoms, along with one of the very few hour-long dramatic series to have originated as a sitcom spin-off, Lou Grant. And the Garry Marshall and Komack/Wolper sitcoms. Speaking of David Wolper, the 1970s also gave us The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, which was and remains light-years ahead of anything that National Geographic or PBS ever did with Cousteau. The 1970s brought us Columbo, McCloud, and Banacek, along with Emergency! and Quincy, M.E. And of course, the 1980s brought us TNG, and St. Elsewhere.

And no, I don't think the 1990s were a low-point. They were simply the start of a long, steady decline. The 1970s gave us Emergency!; what do we have now? Station 19. Not only is the fire station dysfunctional, it tears all the "fun" out of disfunctional. Up until Seinfeld and Roseanne at the very end of the 1980s, successful sitcoms were generally about nice people (yes, even Cloris Leachman's "Phyllis Lyndstrom" was a fairly sympathetic and well-meaning character), not about complete assholes.

Now, about the only current commercial television I care about is Jeopardy! And the "next generation" version of Night Court (originally another product of the 1980s), I might occasionally watch an Angels baseball game, or Olympic figure skating, or (on the rare occasions when I'm aware that it's even televised) a curling match, but that's about it. I ignore what's on, and mostly just watch DVDs. And read (I'm now 2/3 of the way through Cassidy Hutchinson's book, and it's still far and away the most readable political memoir I've ever read, even if I'd hardly call it, or any other political memoir, entertaining.)

 

[Avro Arrow]

I get that with a discussion around Ishmael, there's going to be some talk about the television shows that are referenced in/related to the story. No issue there. But I do think that going into a discussion on the historical state of television in general is somewhat off-topic for a book review thread.

The TV & Media forum would be great for these kind of discussions, though. Please feel free to continue over there.

 

[Christopher]

Who said I was talking about "genre television"? I was talking about television in general.

I know we've been asked to table this, so I'll just say briefly that this is my point. When I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, genre TV was rarely allowed to be as good as non-genre TV, because execs assumed sci-fi was kid stuff and pressured genre shows to dumb down. It wasn't until the late '80s and afterward that genre TV was consistently approached with the same maturity and sophistication as non-genre TV.

And I'll leave it at that.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I think both our points have been made, and concede that yours is as valid as mine. Let's get back to Ishmael, Hambly, HCTB, and other shows actually alluded to. I think I'll re-read the present opus. right after I finish Cassidy Hutchinson's book, and Escape Route, and I re-read Rules of Engagement. (As to "kid stuff," I assert that Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and the original Captain Kangaroo are better than most prime time TV.)

 

[nightwind1]

I miss Legend. It was a pleasant island in the sea of pure drivel into which television had already degenerated. A Brightspot (yes, that's a Janet Kagan shoutout) in the gloom of all the monuments to Kitman's Law.

The entire series is on YouTube. The picture quality is rather poor, but it's still a fun watch.