'...But now his long slow wrath is brimming over, and all the forest is filled with it. The coming of the hobbits and the tidings that they brought have spilled it: it will soon be running like a flood; but its tide is turned against Saruman and the axes of Isengard. A thing is about to happen which has not happened since the Elder Days: the Ents are going to wake up and find that they are strong .' The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien , page 122 My favorite media have at least one "stand up and cheer" moment. Without going into spoilers, I'll talk about why.

I'm a big reader of science fiction, with some top-of-mind recommendations the Torchship trilogy by Karl K. Gallagher, the Lady Astronaut series by Mary Robinette Kowal, the Old Man's War series by John Scalzi, and Shades of Grey by Jasper Fford. What I've had to learn several times is that reading different genres is a skill, and some people bounce off science fiction because they don't (yet) have the skills and vocabulary, and similarly I picked up some habits reading sci-fi that do not translate to other genres.

Today--August 6, 2025--marks 80 years since the first nuclear weapon was used in anger, and August 9 will mark 80 years since the last one was deployed against an enemy (I expect and hope). Although the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II is tragic, the fact that we as a species have kept a nuclear taboo is worth celebrating.

Enthusiasts of naval history might know that the aircraft carrier made the big-gun battleship obsolete: the air wing's extreme range advantage over big guns coupled with inherent speed of an aircraft carrier (because it needed to provide "wind over deck" to enable its air wing to take off and land) meant that a battleship might never be able to return fire before it was sunk. But in World War II the Imperial Japanese Navy's plan for the Battle of Midway was to destroy the US Navy's aircraft carriers primarily by the gun power of its battleships. The result was the sinking of all four Japanese aircraft carriers assigned to the operation, but in a way that surprised me.