Comparison of Starbucks throughout History

Characters named Starbuck have made appearances in popular culture for more than 150 years. Among them:

Appearance of Starbuck	Medium	Date Introduced	Role of Starbuck	Identifying Characteristics	Quote
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale	Novel	1851	First mate to Captain Ahab on the whaling ship Pequod	Serious, sincere Quaker and fine leader. Tries to reason with Ahab to give up his crazy quest for revenge on the white whale.	"Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!"
Starbucks Coffee Company	Coffee Shop	1971	Name of company	Founder Gordon Bowke originally wanted to name the company Pequod, after the ship in Moby-Dick. He was convinced to name it after the ship's first mate instead.	“No one's going to drink a cup of Pee-quod!” (Terry Heckler, Bowke’s creative partner)
Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979)	TV Series	1978	Lieutenant on the Battlestar Galactica	Cocky, cigar-smoking, hard-drinking womanizer, considered to be the best fighter pilot in the Colonial Fleet. Played by Dirk Benedict, who later went on to star in The A Team.	“Ten thousand light years from nowhere, our planet shot to pieces, people starving, and I'm gonna get us in trouble?”
The Snow Queen	Novel	1980	Consort to Snow Queen Arienrhod of Tiamat	Hardhearted man of few words who commands all the mer hunts in the kingdom. Likes dressing in leather bondage clothing and  engaging in battles to the death.	“Don't waste your pity on me, sibyl, because you won't get any back.”
Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009)	TV Series	2004	Lieutenant and later Captain on the Battlestar Galactica	Cocky, cigar-smoking, hard-drinking manizer, considered to be the best fighter pilot in the Colonial Fleet. Goes on a crazy quest to find the original Earth. Played by Katee Sackhoff, who later went on to star in Robot Chicken.	“Me in a dress is a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

Book Review: The Light of Day

Eric Ambler
1962
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

On the surface of it, this book had all the ingredients of a great mystery story. It is set in exotic locations in Greece and Turkey. The main character is a dumpy small-time crook who gets caught up to his neck in international intrigue. The British author, Ambler, who was described on the book’s 1962 cover as “the greatest living writer of the novel of suspense,” had been, among other things, a songwriter, a vaudeville comedian, an ad executive, and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. So I was raring to read it.

The story is about Arthur Abdel Simpson, son of a British father and an Egyptian mother, who lives in Athens and makes a living as a petty thief and distributor of pornography. One day he picks the wrong tourist to scam; his mark turns out to be a member of a ring of spies (or maybe thieves or drug smugglers) who catches Arthur red-handed trying to steal his travelers checks and blackmails him into helping with a major caper.

At first, Arthur’s task is just to drive a car from Athens to Istanbul. It is supposed to be an easy job but he forgets that his Egyptian passport has expired, so he gets stopped at the Turkish border. The car is searched and the customs officials find guns and grenades hidden in the door panels. The Turkish equivalent of the CIA then makes Arthur a deal: they won’t arrest him for possession of the weaponry if he agrees to stay with the gang and provide information about what they’re up to. So Arthur wangles his way into becoming the gang’s full-time driver, lodges with them in their villa outside Istanbul, and generally gets involved way over his head in their scheme.

It’s hard to say sometimes why a book doesn’t quite catch your imagination the way it seems it should. What happened was that I’d often reach the end of a paragraph and realize that I’d spaced out and missed what had happened and had to go back and read it again. I didn’t look forward to picking this book up again after I’d taken a break and would find myself reading other things instead.

It had a heck of a lot of what seemed like unnecessary detail. All distances were exactly estimated: there was an island sixty kilometers from Pendik; a wall was twenty feet high; they had one-hundred fifty yards to go; there was a sheer drop of thirty feet; the roof was thirty-five feet wide. The gang’s preparations seemed needlessly convoluted: they went to garages, resorts, restaurants, museums, and back and forth to Istanbul about fifty times, without anything major happening most of the time. And every move Arthur made was described in excruciating detail even though he seemed to spend most of the time dusting the car and filling it with gas.

The best parts of the book were actually Arthur’s rare flashbacks to his British public school childhood, when he was a loner and a troublemaker and had colorful run-ins with teachers and administrators.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Song Lyrics: The Seventh Son

Everybody talkin' 'bout the seventh son
In the whole wide world there is only one

And I'm the one, I'm the one
I'm the one, I'm the one, the one they call the seventh son

I can tell your future, it will come to pass
I can do things to you make your heart feel glad
Look in the sky, predict the rain
Tell when a woman's got another man

I'm the one, oh I'm the one
I'm the one, I'm the one, the one they call the seventh son

I can talk these words that will sound so sweet
They will even make your little heart skip a beat
Heal the sick, raise the dead
Make the little girls talk outta their heads

I'm the one, oh I'm the one
I'm the one, I'm the one, the one they call the seventh son

-- From “The Seventh Son” by Willie Dixon
Popularized by Johnny Rivers

Book Review: Seventh Son

Orson Scott Card

1987

Awards: Locus

Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Seventh Son is the first novel in Orson Scott Card’s multi-volume “Tales of Alvin Maker” series, which is set in the early 1800s in an alternate America. Card’s version of America has the same landscape and contains many of the same celebrities as ours, but history has taken a slightly different course, so geographical boundaries and the roles of pivotal figures are often very different.

And in Card’s fictional America, folk legends and traditional magic are real. Some people (primarily churchmen) deride it as superstition or even heresy, but it works nonetheless.

The series’ central character is Alvin Miller, Jr., the thirteenth child of a white farm family. They have settled in Wobbish Territory (what we would call “Wabash,” in central Indiana). Alvin’s birth status as the seventh son of a seventh son means that he has been born with powers of tremendous import—the ability to fix things, to create, to heal. But it also means that there are people who are suspicious and afraid of him, and that there are natural forces in the world that don’t seem to want him to survive. He’s always having to avoid suddenly falling roof beams, flooding rivers, and giant runaway millstones.

When I read the synopsis of Seventh Son on the back cover of my library’s paperback edition, and I learned that it covered the first ten years of Alvin’s life, I thought for sure it was going to be a hokey, over-sweet children’s story about magic. But it actually is, as advertised, a serious and sometimes grim tale about a boy having to carve his own path in life against tough odds, while also trying to remain sensitive and caring of others.

The book sucks you in right away by starting with the story of Alvin’s birth. Alvin’s mother (nine months pregnant with him), father, and all twelve brothers and sisters are in a wagon train making their way westward across the Hio territory. They make it about halfway across the Hatrack River when a sudden raging flood swamps them all. The local townspeople come to rescue them, but not before one brother is swept away downstream and Alvin’s mother goes into labor.

A few months after Alvin is born, his family migrates from Hatrack to the northwestern side of Wobbish Territory where they found the town of Vigor Church (named for the brother who died in the river). This is where Alvin spends his first ten years, growing up and navigating forces both human and supernatural. Some of his influences are positive, like the traveler Taleswapper, the first person who really understands Alvin and recognizes his potential, and who becomes a mentor to him. And some are negative, like the local Presbyterian preacher, Reverend Thrower, who thinks Alvin is the devil’s spawn.

Orson Scott Card is an active Mormon, which makes me think that the treatment of religion would be particularly important to him in his writing. But I’m not sure what to make of the messages Card is sending about religion in this book.

On the one hand, Alvin and many of the other people in his world are definitely in touch with something supernatural—some kind of force that lets them do things such as calm people down, protect loved ones from harm, or see into the future. They call it having a “knack.” And it is a fact that Alvin can do magical things, and has a great reserve of natural powers to draw on, and that he is in danger from other powers that mean him harm.

But at the same time, the practitioners of established religions are some of the least sympathetic characters in the book. Reverend Thrower is twenty-four years old and supremely arrogant; he sees it as his mission to convert everyone in the territory to his church, even though he really considers them all loathsome “Red Men” and “English scum”. He is full of judgment, intolerance, and hate.

Reverend Thrower is frustrated by Alvin, because Alvin constantly questions anything that doesn’t make sense to him, including most of what the Reverend preaches. What the Reverend thinks is sophisticated theological paradox (e.g. “God on His Topless Throne”), Alvin thinks is silly or funny—and you agree with Alvin.

Alvin’s sister Eleanor, who is an avid believer in folk magic, marries Armor-of-God Weaver, a devout churchman. Armor-of-God prohibits Eleanor from practicing what he thinks are her silly superstitions, but she continues to do it in secret, under his nose, and has better luck protecting her family from harm than he does with all his virtuous posturing.

Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, himself practiced religious folk magic when he was younger, and drew on many of those folk beliefs (like scrying) when founding his own religion. So it is interesting to me that there are elements in this book that seem to evoke Mormon tradition while celebrating folk religion at the same time. Taleswapper, for example, carries a notebook in which he writes down new proverbs that occur to him; they come to his mind in the form of letters of flame, showing him what should be written on the page. Joseph Smith exhibited a similar mysticism when he transcribed his Book of Mormon based on visions he saw while looking at seeing stones in the bottom of a hat, and he set a precedent for other elders to add to the canon when they saw holy visions as well.

                      

Anyway, specific religious meaning aside, Orson Scott Card has a real talent for this kind of story. Like Card’s other boy hero, Ender Wiggin, Alvin Miller is a precocious child with overwhelming potential. Like Ender, Alvin is beset by ferocious enemies and bullies. And, like Ender, because of his abilities, Alvin has to grow up too quickly, largely on his own, learning from his own mistakes, first to find his own path to survival and then later to try to bring meaning to his life.

What is especially appealing about Alvin is that his powers validate life and creativity. Alvin is a maker: a person who is naturally able to put things together strongly and beautifully. He can do this on a big scale by healing gaping wounds or by building furniture and machinery, and he can do this on a small scale by making tiny woven grass “bug baskets” for fun. But no matter the scale, every time he makes something, he pushes back the great destructive forces of the universe, even a little bit. Every effort is important and worthwhile, no matter how small and pointless it seems.

The book ends with Alvin at age ten, preparing to leave his family home to become a blacksmith’s apprentice, but Alvin’s story continues on in the next book, Red Prophet.

Book Review: The Chronoliths

Robert Charles Wilson

2001
Awards: Campbell

Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Wilson really knows how to come up with a premise that immediately hooks you, and then how to reel out that premise over the course of a fast-paced, page-turning novel. The Chronoliths, is a solid case in point; it was almost as much fun as his later novel Spin.

Like Spin, The Chronoliths is set in the near future and stars ordinary people thrust into extraordinary times by threatening and mysterious futuristic technology.

When the book opens, the main character, our hero Scott Warden, is happily wasting his life away as an American ex-pat in Thailand, spending most of his time with his disreputable, drug-dealing best friend Hitch, and royally screwing up his relationship with his wife and small daughter, when he witnesses the sudden appearance, out of nowhere, of an enormous glassy blue obelisk smack in the middle of Bangkok. It has flattened most of downtown.

The writing on the obelisk explains that it is a monument commemorating the military victory of some leader named “Kuin” over Thailand—and it is dated more than twenty years in the future.

Scott and Hitch, naturally, decide they have to go investigate the monument and, naturally, they get detained almost immediately by military patrols. This means that Scott is not home when his daughter loses part of her hearing from a severe ear infection, prompting his wife to declare that she’s had enough of this lifestyle, and flies herself and their daughter back to the States.

                                                                                                      

Over the next few years, these blue monuments, dubbed “chronoliths” by the press, appear all over southeast Asia, and then start spreading elsewhere—Beijing, the Middle East, Cairo.

After the arrival of a couple chronoliths, an old physics professor of Scott’s, Sue Chopra, pulls him in to work for her. She is heading a government project to unravel the mystery of the chronoliths. She wants Scott involved because he was there at the appearance of the first one, and that makes her think his fate is somehow intertwined with theirs.

The chronoliths and the mysterious, seemingly unstoppable Kuin inspire panic, throwing the world into an economic tailspin. Poverty spikes, employment grinds to a halt, skirmishes break out everywhere. It is as if Kuin, by declaring his victories twenty years in advance, is causing countries to destroy themselves in fear and chaos before he even raises an army.

Which is exactly what Sue Chopra says is the point. The chronoliths themselves create a self-reinforcing feedback loop; by appearing, they destabilize countries and scare or impress people into following Kuin or acceding to him, thus earning him a victory before he has to fire a shot. If Sue can figure out how to disrupt the onward march of the chronoliths, she thinks that will reverse the feedback loop and prevent Kuin from coming to power in the first place.

The rest of the book is a relatively fast-paced race against time, in which Sue and Scott and their team have to figure out how the chronoliths got here and how to stop them before the twenty years are up and Kuin finally really arrives on the scene in person. Scott’s whole family ends up embroiled in it, with his daughter and his ex-wife’s new husband both getting caught up with dangerously fanatical groups of Kuin devotees.

                                   

The Chronoliths poses the usual deep-think time-travel questions, such as: What if the future is predetermined and no matter what I do now, it will inevitably contribute to bringing the chronoliths? And: What if I do prevent the chronoliths from coming and it causes some kind of paradox or parallel universe in which the things I know will no longer exist? But don’t expect anything super profound from it; it is primarily a fun, easy read.

Scott Warden kind of reminds me of the main present-day character from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Scott is a bearded hippiesh throwback and something of a ne’er-do-well, with penchants both for southeast Asian countries with beaches and for messing up his personal life. He’s not really all that appealing and not very sympathetic, except that he’s smart. But that doesn’t really matter; the ideas carry the book along in spite of Scott’s down sides.

I think Wilson could easily write a blockbuster multi-million-selling novel if he wanted to. He knows how to set up an engaging premise and then reveal its facets at a comfortable pace. I think maybe the reason they aren’t blockbusters is probably that they’re a little too subtle, and maybe a little too nerdy. Which, of course, is what makes his books better than your average blockbuster.