Don't buy these books!

Alphascript has begun publishing Star Trek-related books. Do not buy them. Alphascript's business model is simple: the content is swiped from wikipedia, and the cost is justified on the grounds that these are print-on-demand books (though Lulu-style POD books can be very reasonably priced). This is the same outfit behind that hundred dollar thesis reprint I mentioned a few posts back.

They have a 168-page book called Star Trek: The Original Series: List of Star Trek: The Original Series episodes, Theme from Star Trek, List of Star Trek: The Original Series writers, Cultural influence of Star Trek, Star Trek. Price: $72. A 236-page book called Star Trek: Gene Roddenberry, Fictional universe, Star Trek: The Original Series, Technology, NBC, Where No Man Has Gone Before, Star Trek: The Animated Series. Price: $94. They're doing similar books for other TV series, including Doctor Who (in fact, I first heard about the Who books over at Gallifrey Base, then checked for Trek stuff.)

The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing

I don't really have a lot to say about this book, because I don't really care much at all about Enterprise or the Romulan War. And, unfortunately, this book didn't change my opinion on either one.

I expect people who like Enterprise will have a much more positive response to the book. It's big and sweeping, with a large cast of characters, and a chain of events spread out over several months. It continues all the storylines from its predecessor, dealing with the fallout of the Kobayashi Maru situation and the beginning of the war with the Romulans.

The thing is, the book feels like it was assembled from a number of pieces that had to be fit together carefully -- ongoing elements from the Enterprise novels as well as bits and pieces of information about this era from episodes of Enterprise and the original Star Trek -- and as a result, it feels paradoxically like there's a lot going on but not much really happening. (It's the same way I felt after reading Forged in Fire and The Red King -- damn, that was a long book, but nothing much happened.) It's also so plot-driven that the characters suffer. The Voyager novel Full Circle had a similar job to do, fitting a lot of puzzle pieces together, but it did so with some powerful character-based storytelling. There was something to hang onto beyond watching the movement of the cogs and gears.

Beneath the Raptor's Wing also feels a bit unbalanced. Some new characters who have a lot to do early on suddenly disappear for hundreds of pages, only to make brief appearances later on; other new characters appear only for a page or two, to add their mosaic tiles to the big picture. Characters make odd choices without much in the way of rationale to make everything fit the few contradictory bits of information we have from canon. I blame the writers of Enterprise, the TV series, for this; the way they used the Romulans on the show makes it hard for anyone to expand on the story and still stay consistent with the few essential bits of backstory from "Balance of Terror."

I still don't buy Trip as an undercover agent at all. I don't buy his decision to stay on Vulcan near the end of the book. I don't like the way the plot seems to require certain characters to be stupid at key points, or to fail to ask obvious questions.

I'll read the next book (hoping all the while that this is no more than a duology), should it be published. I'm not looking forward to it, though.

Star Trek: Crew

Comics legend John Byrne has become one of the mainstays of IDW's Star Trek comics, and I'm coming around to the idea that that's a good thing. Though I haven't been crazy about some of his Romulan stuff, the Assignment: Earth miniseries was a fun read, and I really enjoyed Crew, too.

Crew is a prequel to the original series, featuring Number One from "The Cage" at several points in her career leading up to that episode. It's a great idea, and one that should appeal to fans of the Star Trek: Early Voyages comic that Marvel produced a few years back and IDW reprinted this year in trade paperback.

Crew has a very deliberately retro feel; this could have come from the 1960s in some respects. This isn't the familiar and well-explored galaxy of modern Trek, it's a place with a lot of dark, unexplored corners. There's even what may be a reference to Forbidden Planet, with an image of a colonists' graveyard on a hillside. There's also some nice use of continuity -- when Number One arrives on the Enterprise, Bob and Sarah April are the captain and chief medical officer, and Christopher Pike and Spock are new arrivals as well. Unlike Early Voyages, which gave Number One the name Robbins, Crew doesn't name its protagonist, but it doesn't try to come up with a silly rationalization about Number One being her name, either. There's also some continuity with Byrne's Past Trek comics: one story is a sequel to one of his Assignment: Earth stories.

If there's any downside, it's the high body count (a lot of people get killed in the course of these stories), and the fact that two stories feature impostors posing as crew members. Overall, though, I really enjoyed it, and strongly recommend it, especially to old school original series fans. John Byrne fans will also enjoy the bonus features: original black and white artwork for one issue and a cover gallery featuring black and white and finished versions of the covers.

Memories of the Future Volume 1

Building on some online posts and podcasts, Wil Wheaton's published a new book, Memories of the Future Volume 1. It's the first in a planned series of eight books in which Wheaton reviews the first four seasons of TNG.

The first volume reviews first season episodes from "Encounter at Farpoint" to "Datalore." Each episode summary is divided into sections: Synopsis, Quotable Dialogue, Obligatory Technobabble, Behind the Scenes Memory, The Bottom Line, and Final Grade. The book looks professionally designed and laid out, with just one tipoff that it's a print-on-demand book from Lulu: there are blank lines as paragraph breaks instead of indents.

The tone is generally snarky, and the humour... well, if a friend was making those remarks while you were both watching the show, they might be funnier. They sometimes fall flat as written commentary. But what makes the book especially worth reading are the moments when Wheaton talks about what it was like to be there filming those episodes -- problems with writers and directors, the way the cast started coming together, and that sort of thing. But it's generally a light and breezy read -- a little too light for the cover price ($19.87 -- get it?), perhaps, but fun enough.

Wheaton's demonstrated in past books like Dancing Barefoot and Just a Geek that he can write, that he can be self-deprecating but also stand up for himself when necessary, and that he's come to terms with the whole Wesley Crusher experience, and even when he criticizes his own performance, you'll be laughing with him, not at him.

On the Death of GeoCities

So, in honor of the impending death of GeoCities, I did a little googling to see if the site or two I played around with and abandoned might still be around. Apparently not, as it turns out, but then it's entirely possible I deleted them myself ages ago. But I did find a copy of an early version of the FASA Trek RPG page from my site presented as part of someone else's Trek gaming site. Someone, under the name grethor_qujmey, posted my page with a little added info including a list of "articals" and some wonky formatting without even deleting my name.

It's disconcerting enough to discover I've been plagiarized (it's happened a few times that I know of); it's downright weird when the plagiarist leaves my name on it.

To Go Where No Other Has Gone Before: Gender and Race in Star Trek

Here's one I'm afraid I won't be buying. Nearly a hundred bucks for a reprint of a doctoral dissertation? From a German print-on-demand firm that, according to Writer Beware, has its contracts set up in such a way that the author will likely never see any royalties despite (or perhaps because of) the high cover price, and that under another imprint publishes books that are just unedited wikipedia entries?

I understand that academic texts are often expensive because of small print runs, but that doesn't apply to print-on-demand. If you were to publish a 180-page trade paperback book through lulu.com, your cost would be in the ballpark of ten dollars. You wouldn't necessarily have your book available through Amazon, as it is if VDM Verlag publishes it, but Amazon has its own POD company, Createspace, which appears to work much the same way as Lulu, and Createspace titles can be listed on Amazon.

It's a shame this book is so expensive, because it sounds like interesting reading, as academic dissertations go: "Casavant analyzes the construction of race and gender in the original Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, uses post-colonial theory to examine the ways in which power functions in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, offering that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the most subversive of all Star Trek shows, and examines how dominant constructions of femininity are both interrogated and reaffirmed in Star Trek: Voyager."

Fortunately, there is an alternative. The dissertation is available through UMI/ProQuest, a company that has specialized in making theses and dissertations available for decades. They don't print nicely bound books, but if you're not affiliated with a university (as staff, faculty, or student) you can buy a pdf for $41; if you are affiliated with a university, you can probably get a copy if the university has access to the database. (If you're worried about losing the author a bit of income by taking this route, go look at the Writer Beware link above; she'd have to sell a lot of copies to get any royalties on sales, and that's not likely to happen with that cover price.)

So... a look at the bibliography shows a number of academic theory sources, but also a lot of Star Trek-related citations. Looks promising.

Trapped in Time

Spoilers. There are often spoilers here. I sometimes forget to point that out.

The last of the DS9 YA novels, Trapped in Time is almost as much of a departure from the original format as the previous book, Honor Bound (see below). Okay, it's a Nog and Jake adventure, but instead of being set during the first couple of seasons, it's set during the Dominion War, with Nog at Starfleet Academy. Jake's visiting Earth with Miles O'Brien, and the three set out to France to visit a scientist who's researching time travel. Before you can say "look out he's a changeling and he's going back through time to change history," well. Off they go to World War II, just before the D-Day Invasion of Normandy.

Miles, Jake, and Nog have to find the changeling, who's taken the form of a Nazi officer and is heading to Paris to inform the regional Nazi military command that the Allies are going to hit the beaches in just a few days. They have run-ins with Nazis and French resistance fighters and Jake gets a bit of a crush on a French girl, at one point saving her life. It feels a little too familiar -- it seems like everyone who does time travel will meet Nazis eventually, whether in Star Trek or Doctor Who or....

There are also some indications that the author hasn't thought this whole changeling thing through: Miles and the others think that tying him up while he's unconscious (from being hit on the head -- would that really do anything to a changeling?) will keep him safe and secure. They learn otherwise, of course, but they should have already known that.

The end of the book may strike some more jaded and cynical readers as fanwanky, but I liked it. First, Miles arranges for Jake to meet someone Miles knows pretty well: Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Second, Picard reveals why he wanted to meet Jake: he has a letter one of his ancestors wrote after the war that the family has passed down until the right moment. Yep, that cute French girl was Picard's great-great-etc-grandmother, and she sends Jake a letter to tell him she survived. Once Picard enters the scene, the family connection's not hard to see coming, but it's a nice touch to end a series of DS9 books with an appearance from a guest star from the very first DS9 episode. And the letter, about surviving the war, strikes a chord for Jake, who's living through the Dominion War.

Overall, I liked it.

Honor Bound

Still catching up with the backlog...

Eleven of the twelve Deep Space Nine young adult books are about the misadventures of Jake Sisko and Nog during their early years there. This one's different. It's about Alexander, son of Worf, living on Earth with Worf's adoptive parents, the Rozhenkos. It ties in with the 1997 Day of Honor crossover about the Klingon holiday of the same name.

Unlike most of the Trek YA books, this one is a problem novel. Alexander is experiencing rages he can't control at a time when just being a Klingon on Earth is bad enough, because of the short-lived war with the Klingons prior to the Dominion War. He doesn't fit in at school any more, he's getting into trouble, fighting other kids, and the Rozhenkos are worried. So Worf comes home in time to visit for the Day of Honor.

Alexander's problem is simple: he's a pubescent Klingon. As is often the case in Star Trek, nature trumps nurture, and Alexander doesn't know how to deal with his inherently violent nature. Worf teaches Alexander mok'bara and reinforces the importance of honour for Klingons; he also tells Alexander about how he accidentally killed a classmate when he was young. Everything gets neatly resolved by the end of the book.

On the one hand, the book is kind of interesting because it does something the TV series almost never seemed to do: it treats Alexander as a character in his own right, not just as a problem for Worf to deal with. On the other hand, it does so in a very conventional story that could be turned into a 20th century YA book about, say, an Asian kid in the US during the Vietnam war, or an Arab kid more recently. Despite the reference to padds and Starfleet and shuttles and whatnot, life in the 24th century is essentially unchanged from 20th century American life. Home life, school, nothing's changed much at all.

As a character story, and a YA story, it's reasonably competent and entertaining, if a bit too easily resolved at the end. But for me, what it does most is point out that Alexander never got the character development he needed onscreen, and it's welcome for making an effort.

Deceptions

Today we take the wayback machine to the late 1990s and then go off on a tangent to the 1950s.

The last of the Next Generation Starfleet Academy young adult novels, Bobbi and David Weiss's Deceptions is an entertaining read. Data and some fellow cadets are on assignment at an archeological dig, where some odd artefacts cause unexpected problems. It's a solidly Star Trek kind of story, the science fictional elements being not very scientific at all (storing emotions in physical objects) but consistent enough with a number of Star Trek episodes. Data is appropriately characterized, a bit more naive than he was at the beginning of TNG, and learning how to get along with humans and aliens. His android nature comes in handy over the course of the story, though none of the other characters really get a lot of development. It's a plot-driven story and moves along quickly. Nothing really special, but it does what it sets out to do.

Pocket published twenty young adult Starfleet novels: fourteen Next Generation books and three each from the original series and Voyager. (The dozen Deep Space Nine YA novels weren't set at the Academy.) The academy setting is an attractive one for both science fiction and young adult fiction. It has built-in character development, because leaving home for school is something of a coming of age, as characters face new responsibilities, take new roles, meet new people, encounter new ideas. It has some audience identification elements, because although no one's been to Starfleet Academy, everyone's been to a new school at some point. It also allows for some major league infodumping: about characters (where are you from? why'd you come to the Academy? what's your homeworld like?), about setting, and about whatever the story ends up being about. You expect infodumps when you're at school.

So it's no wonder so many people have decided to do Academy stories -- Harve Bennett wanted to do Kirk and the gang at the Academy, J.J. Abrams actually did it, Marvel produced the Starfleet Academy comic book series, and so on. Academy days were often discussed in the various Trek TV series, and one episode was specifically about Academy life (TNG's "The First Duty.")

If Yvonne Fern's Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation is to be believed, the science fiction novel that had the most influence on Roddenberry when he created the show was Robert A. Heinlein's juvenile (the 1950s term for young adult books) Space Cadet. That book was the direct inspiration for the 1950s multimedia phenomenon Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, which was a TV series, a radio series, a series of novels, a series of comic books, daily newspaper comic strips, and a lot of toys. The show was aimed at a younger audience than Heinlein's novel, but the basic premise was the same: a few young men meet at the Space Academy, become cadets, and have adventures while working for the interplanetary body that defends American values in space.

I loved the Tom Corbett books as a kid. Like the Starfleet Academy books, they're kid-friendly reads with fun space adventures, but the Tom Corbett books, being a few decades older, have a few drawbacks (they're very much from a white male American world, and they're dated scientifically, too) and arguably some strengths (they don't have that awareness of YA as problem novels that modern YA books, even those that aren't about teenage alcoholism or abortion or drug abuse or crime, always seem to have somewhere). There are only eight novels and they aren't that hard to track down -- seven of them are available at Project Gutenberg as free ebooks. Oddly enough, someone seems to have produced a Kindle version of those seven books, with what looks like a photoshopped publicity shot of Chris Pine as James T. Kirk from the Abrams movie on the cover. You can find a few episodes of the series online at the Internet Archive, but the books hold up a lot better than the no-budget, live-to-air TV episodes.

Self-indulgent post on the site's forthcoming tenth anniversary

I don't know the exact date, and I'm not even sure about the month, but the Complete Starfleet Library is damn near ten years old. The oldest backup CD ROM I can find right now is from March 2000, and the first version of the website logo there is dated December 14, 1999. Maybe I should go with that as the official date.

My first Trek web content was a page on the then almost completely forgotten Mack Reynolds novel, Mission to Horatius. In 1995, the Pocket reprint was still a few years in the future and it sometimes seemed, from usenet discussions about Trek books, that I was the only person online who remembered it. So I created a page. It's still online here, last updated in 1999.

In 1997, I decided to do a page on something else that wasn't really covered anywhere online: Gene Roddenberry's unpublished Star Trek novel, The God Thing. And if I was going to have two pages, why not more? And the Lost Books page was born. And Star Trek: The Forgotten Books. The few Trek book-related sites that existed pretty much covered only Pocket's books, and not even all of them; a number of early books had somehow faded from Pocket's institutional memory. The first version of the Forgotten Books page covered those Pocket books; basically, any Trek book from 1979 to 1987 or so that wasn't a mass market paperback novel was unlisted on the official Pocket site.

By 1999, the Forgotten Books page had expanded its purpose: "This site includes officially licensed Star Trek novels, adaptations, and nonfiction books from Bantam and Ballantine, early Pocket books not listed on their website, and dozens of unauthorized Trek books. As of October, 1999, there are over 250 books described here." But as I added more content, it seemed obvious that the site should cover everything, not just the stuff not covered elsewhere. And by December 1999, the madness had begun in earnest...

It's not like the site started ten years ago, was quickly developed and completed, and just gets the occasional book added to it now. Every year there's new developments. There have been a few feature articles (SF Media Tie-Ins: A Brief History; Stardate 7600, or what a Trek fan's website might have looked like if there'd been a web in 1976; From Star Trek to Star Wolf: David Gerrold's Worlds of Star Trek; and the Fanzine Gallery). This year I added the schedule page and improved the FASA page and I may yet finish the short story and essays/articles indexes. One of these days I'd like to have something on Star Fleet Battles. There's always something.