Fight Uni

Star Dragon. These two words, when put together, make complete and total sense the second you hear them. It was nearly 7 years ago since I was in a bookstore and I saw this book. I didn’t have any money at the time, and this book was apparently new and therefore even more out of my price range. I did, however, manage to read the book’s selected excerpt and I immediately knew that I had to read this book. I didn’t know how or when, but those two words resonated within my head for more than 5 years.

Flash Forward: 2009. I’m not as broke as I was back in 2003 and I have a job that basically pays me to read for a large portion of my day. It’s not unusual that I’ll be able to read a book every week. I’ve managed to read entire text books in less than a month, all on the company’s dime. This kind of freedom does come with some responsibility. For school and personal endeavors, I work with a lot of technical equipment, software, and programming languages. Many of the books I read at work usually pertain to a piece of knowledge I need to know in order to stay up-to-date. Every once in awhile though, I’ll get a chance to read a book purely for fun. It’s thanks to this job that I’ve finally been able to read books like Slaughterhouse-Five, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1984, Brave New World, On the Road, and many other enjoyable reads.

I bought this book more than a year before I actually got the chance to read it. I bought it because I needed books to read and I had to order it online since I couldn’t find it at any of the nearby bookstores. I must have been in a thrifty state of mind because I decided to order a used copy, hoping for maybe a slightly beat-up book. What I got was a book from a library that hacked apart the cover to add stickers and laminate. It was from the Okanagan library in Canada and had only been checked out twice. I didn’t have time to readit as soon as I got the book, so I left it on my bookshelves, wondering when I was going to finally find out what a Star Dragon actually was. All I knew about the novel was that a team of scientists set out on a mission across the galaxy to investigate a mysterious video depicting a dragon flying through a nebula. If that doesn’t strike you as the adventure novel of a lifetime, then maybe you should go back to reading See Spot Run.

It is now October 2010, and I have finished this book. It took me roughly four 8-hour shifts to read all 352 pages, and it is safe to say that this is a very enjoyable book. Mike Brotherton does a good job of creating a believable, though sometimes quirky future. Like the main character in the novel, you become more and more obsessed with finding out everything you can about the elusive Star Dragon. You spend about 2/3 of the novel just getting to the damn nebula (Which takes 250 years earth time just to get to). The build-up is part of what reminded me of King Kong. In that movie, they spend a long time on the boat just to reach Kong Island. It helps build not only the characters, but the suspense as well.

I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, so I hope you do read the book. Like I’ve mentioned before, I have a thing for Giant Monsters, and Star Dragon is one of the more creative monsters I remember hearing about in recent years. Sure Biollante was cool, but something about a dragon that survives in a nebula is very intriguing. If you’re as curious as I was, get the book. You’ll probably have to buy it online.