Titan art by Geoff Thorne

Over at the TrekBBS Trek Art forum, Geoff Thorne (author of the Titan novel Sword of Damocles) is doing a series of illustrations for an imaginary Titan animated series, with character drawings and wallpapers inspired by the books in the series. He's also posted them on his Sword of Damocles annotations blogspot site.

The Titan crew is a diverse one, with a number of characters original to the books, so a series of illustrations is helpful. The cartoony style Thorne is using here is simple but fun, and it's not hard to imagine an actual animated series using these character designs. Well worth checking out.

Random news

Kristine Smith, whose vanity press book DeForest Kelley: A Harvest of Memories: My Life and Times With a Remarkable Gentleman Actor was published back in 2001, has a new ebook out: Enduring Legacy of DeForest Kelley. 61 pages for US$4.95. The description from the publisher's site:

DeForest Kelley's former personal assistant Kristine M Smith has compiled the memories and reminiscences of fans and friends whose lives were blessed and changed forever by the career or kindness of the late actor who portrayed Dr. Leonard McCoy in the original Star Trek series. All who contributed to the tome have realized the immense impact that the iconic "Bones" has had on their lives and careers. Smith reveals that Kelley's enduring legacy includes fans who continue to boldly go where few have gone before, making a difference every step of the way."

Meanwhile, Anita Okrent has a book on invented languages that apparently includes some discussion of Klingon: In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language. Looks interesting, but it won't be added to the site, because it's not primarily about Star Trek.

John Erik Ege has found the latest way to risk a CBS smackdown: selling Star Trek fanfic on Amazon for the Kindle.

McFarland, publisher of a few nonfiction books on Star Trek, will be publishing David Greven's Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek: Allegories of Desire in the Television Series and Films in fall/winter 2009.

Publisher's description:

Studying the Star Trek myth from the original 1960s series to the 2009 franchise-reboot film, this book challenges frequent accusations that the Star Trek saga refuses to represent queer sexuality. Arguing that Star Trek speaks to queer audiences through subtle yet distinctive allegorical narratives, the analysis pays close attention to representations of gender, race, and sexuality to develop an understanding of the franchise’s queer sensibility. Topics include the 1960s original’s deconstruction of the male gaze and the traditional assumptions of male visual mastery; constructions of femininity in Star Trek: Voyager, particularly in the relationship between Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine; and the ways in which Star Trek: Enterprise’s adoption of neoconservative politics may have led to its commercial and aesthetic failure.

Greven has an article on Enterprise available here: The twilight of identity: Enterprise, neoconservatism, and the death of Star Trek. It's a good article, so I expect the book should be pretty good.

Out now (and on order from Amazon): Star Trek: A Post-Structural Critique of the Original Series by Michael Hemmingson, published by Wildside Press.

Well-known writer Michael Hemmingson offers a history and critique of the original Star Trek TV series, and the impact it has had on our culture, language, and science. Also included is the first coverage in book form of the 2009 Star Trek motion picture.

In Pocket news, one of next year's TBA novels is apparently Inception, a TOS novel by S.D. Perry. And the forthcoming Enterprise novel about the Romulan War has a subtitle now, Beneath the Raptor's Wing, which may suggest that there will be more than one Romulan War novel. I think one is plenty, but others are free to disagree.

Troublesome Minds

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Dave Galanter's Troublesome Minds is a deliberate throwback to the old days of standalone Star Trek novels. He's said he wanted to go back to the feel of original series episodes, so we have a story that focuses on Kirk, Spock, and McCoy as they deal with the alien of the week. So far, so good. He's also said he wanted an ending that doesn't tie things up neatly, that leaves the reader wondering if there might have been another way. Still sounds promising. And the core idea, that an exceptional telepath can take over his or her entire society of telepaths without even understanding that it's happening, is an interesting one.

But the book didn't really work for me. There are some great stories that begin with someone doing what seems like the right thing, only to learn that it may not have been, and every step taken towards putting things right takes the protagonist farther away from any kind of positive resolution. What often makes that kind of story work is a tight focus on a viewpoint character, so we can clearly see the thought processes going into the decisions, understand what seems to be the right way to go, and share the character's concern/frustration/despair/desperation that things keep getting worse. A lot of noir fiction, for example, is built on this sort of thing.

But we don't really get that character perspective in Troublesome Minds. We're introduced to a number of new alien characters, but the telepathic Isitri never become real characters, much less viewpoint characters, because of the key point in the story: their minds are being controlled by a "troublesome mind," an extraordinarily powerful telepath who may not even realize that he's controlling everyone around him. Berlis himself, the troublesome mind, is presented as a guy who's not necessarily bad. He's not a cackling evil villain, he's a naive nice guy who just has a way of making everyone agree with him on everything, and on agreeing that he's a nice guy. But again he's not a viewpoint character. Kirk, Spock, or McCoy could be -- but a key part of the story is that Spock may be compromised by exposure to Berlis's telepathic control, so he won't work as a viewpoint character. As the man who makes the decisions, Kirk's the logical choice. But instead Galanter opts for third-person omniscient narration. He occasionally gives us bits and pieces of what characters are noticing or thinking, but generally stays on the outside, giving us a lot of what's going on in people's minds by saying that someone is smirking or scoffing or sneering. (There's a bit of Diane Carey-style writing going on here. More below.) That distancing is fatal, because I never really cared about any of the aliens, and I didn't get close enough to the regulars to feel what they were going through. I sometimes wondered, why is Kirk doing this? I didn't get enough of the reasoning behind some of his actions. To mix metaphors, the characters were like pawns in a game of chess played by someone with a stacked deck.

I think the book will do reasonably well, though; a lot of people have been waiting for a straightforward standalone novel. For that matter, a lot of people, including writers whose work I enjoy, like Diane Carey-style writing. There will probably be people who will find this one of the most satisfying Star Trek novels in some time, and fair play to them.

And now for some nitpicking. The main review is over. This is stuff I wrote while reading the book; it's some of the things that bugged me and don't really rise to the level of being a proper review. But still, they tasked me, and I will have them.

Okay... telepathic aliens. They don't use spoken or written language, and a lot of them are deaf (never mind that deafness puts them at an evolutionary disadvantage; hearing's not just good for talking, it's good for knowing there's a dangerous animal growling at you, or a truck behind you honking its horn). They either use telepathy or sign language. They don't string letters together because they have no written language, and they don't string sounds together because they have no spoken language and many of them are deaf. So how do they come up with names like Berlis and Chista?

They're also a reasonably advanced technological culture, but their telepathy does not result in a hive mind, so we can't assume they use their brains for distributed computing and information storage. They have cities and space travel but no books. To take one simple example, what do their engineers use for math tables? If a troublesome mind, as the Isitri call powerful telepaths, takes over everyone's consciousness for a generation or two and people have no memory of what happened during his or her rule, how do they preserve any information -- history, culture, whatever? This is addressed somewhat eventually, by saying that information is shared in the it's-not-a-group-mind, but I'm not convinced.

Then there's the prose.

"He had large eyes that bulged even when closed, and flat nostrils without a pronounced nose -- an interesting evolution." (p.5) Interesting to whom? There's no clear POV in this passage. The scene begins with McCoy talking, but a few paragraphs later Kirk is noticing something. There's no real attempt at portraying the scene's events from one character's perspective, it's written as by an omniscient third party narrator. So who finds it interesting? And for that matter, "an interesting evolution?" Wow, that's quite the evolution you have there, Bob!

Next, let's review a couple of definitions. Sneer: to smile, laugh, or contort the face in a manner that shows scorn or contempt; to speak or write in a manner expressive of derision or scorn. Scoff: to speak derisively; mock; jeer.

On p.113, Galanter has Kirk scoffing at Spock. On p.125, Kirk sneers at Chekov. On TV, Kirk has some disagreements with his officers. But scorn? Contempt? Derision? I don't think so. In this context, I suspect it's just meant as a Careyism: the use of any word other than "said." But those aren't action words (see below), they express a particular emotional state that's wrong for Kirk in general and for Kirk in these scenes in particular.

Action! "Kirk hammered the doctor with a sharp glare." Another Careyism, from a paragraph on p.126. This is a cheap and silly effect. It's not an action sequence. Writing it as if it is doesn't make it exciting, it detracts from any real drama or suspense the scene may be building. Should you really stop reading at this point to try to picture a sharp hammer? Not the only time this sort of thing happens. Still, at least Galanter doesn't indulge himself with this stuff as much as Carey does. And, hell, I doubt Galanter minds being compared to Carey, who I gather has been something of a friend and mentor, along with her husband, Greg Brodeur.

Star Trek Omnibus Volume 1

For a change, IDW is reprinting material that hasn't been published in book form before. (Well, three issues were.) This omnibus reprints issues 4 through 18 of Marvel's 1980-81 run of Star Trek comics. (The first three issues were a reprint of the magazine-sized special movie adaptation, and they'll be in a future IDW collection of comic adaptations of Trek movies.)

In 1979, Marvel getting the licence seemed like good news. Gold Key was still publishing its comic but it had long been an uneven series, aimed too much at kids and, in its early years, produced by people who knew nothing about the TV series. Marvel, which produced a lot of the best comics of the 1970s, and which had tie-in experience aplenty (2001: A Space Odyssey, Logan's Run, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica) had to do a better job. Hell, it would probably be amazing.

Then the comics started coming out, and all that optimism faded quickly. The movie adaptation was a sloppy-looking rush job. And then the first three issues of the comic, as I mentioned above, just reprinted that adaptation, giving us stuff we already had and didn't like that much the first time. The first original story was about a haunted house in space, a two-parter that was begun by Marv Wolfman but finished by Mike W. Barr, who (IIRC) wasn't told how Wolfman had planned to end the story. Not a good sign. There were a lot of changes in creative staff over the fifteen issues of original stories. Writers included Wolfman, Barr, Martin Pasko, Tom DeFalco, Michael Fleisher, Alan Brennert, and J.M. DeMatteis. There was a similar number of artists. With that kind of turnover in that short a time, there was no way the comic could maintain any kind of consistency, much less develop any kind of vision or story arc, and on rereading this collection, I found, ironically, that some of the better stories read and felt a lot like the better Gold Key comics. And the worst didn't have the so-bad-it's-good appeal of the worst Gold Key comics.

So, it's not great reading, though Barr, at least, went on to write much better material for later Star Trek comics. So, how does the book look? Is it at least a pleasure to look at? No, not really. The art wasn't always all that great to begin with, but it's badly reproduced here. Colours are often faded, sometimes missing, sometimes the wrong colour (I checked against the scans on the Star Trek comic DVD released last year; those look a hell of a lot better). Even the black inked lines and dialogue are sometimes thin and faded.

I'd love to be able to recommend this as a flawed but intriguing look at an early phase in the history of Trek comics, or as some of the first post-TMP tie-in fiction, but it simply isn't very good. I do recommend buying the comic DVD, which includes all these comics and hundreds more for about twice the price of this book. You can read these stories there in the comfort of knowing there's a lot of much better material to be read on the DVD.

So, there's a new Star Trek movie

And Alan Dean Foster wrote the novelization. Foster's an old hand at this; back in the '70s, he wrote the Star Trek Logs, which adapted and expanded the animated series episodes. He's also written a lot of other high profile novelizations, including Star Wars, as well as a lot of original SF and fantasy novels.

So you'd expect this to be a pretty good book, right? Well, not so much. It suffers from two very obvious problems.

First, this movie was written to be a flashy action blockbuster, and as much as I liked the movie, the story is carried by the cast and the way the film never stops moving. You don't get much time to realize that half of it doesn't make much sense. But it does the job it was meant to do: it makes Star Trek a name that people are excited about again. The thing is, that doesn't make for a great novelization. When you rely so much on the actors' performances and the special effects, and you try to make the story work without them, you're screwed.

Unless you can do what people who novelize movies have been doing for decades: expand on the story, tidy up the plot holes, make it all make more sense. And here's where the second problem comes in. Foster doesn't do that. I assume it's because he just didn't have the time to do it, though it's possible he was asked by Abrams or Orci or Kurtzman or someone not to. But the time argument works for me because the book is just plain sloppy at times. In one case, an interchange between two characters is repeated, reworded, a couple of pages later. Dialogue is rewritten in ways that lose the punchlines. There are some really odd similes and metaphors.

"She looked helplessly toward the doctor, who, despite the desperate situation that had engulfed the Kelvin, responded to the incoming query with the kind of reserve and calm aspired to by every physician who had ever uttered a healing mantra, picked up a willow branch, and twirled it widdershins over a queasy patient."

W. T. F.? That's not just a clunky run-on sentence, it's one with a really odd image. Real physicians may aspire to reserve and calm, but I don't necessarily associate those qualities with witches practicing spells (who else uses the word widdershins?), nor do I see any useful metaphorical relationship between medicine and spell casting. It might seem appropriate in a fantasy novel aimed at the pagan/wicca crowd, but in a Star Trek novel?

This is a disappointing novel, because it's based on a "you have to see it on the big screen" big dumb fun blockbuster, and because it doesn't do anything more than remind you what you saw on the screen.

Random tidbits

The Complete Starfleet Library website was profiled by Jason Boog on mediabistro's galleycat blog a couple weeks ago. I was surprised to realize that we'd swapped emails about noir mystery writer Cornell Woolrich a few years back. Jason is obviously a man of discernment and taste.

An outfit called Premiere Collectibles is doing a fairly reasonably priced limited edition hardcover of Alan Dean Foster's movie novelization. I don't think I'll bother with it, though; I have the Pocket trade paperback already, and looking at the speakers' bureau side of Premiere's business, I don't think I want to give them any of my money. Aside from this Trek book, everything they do seems to be about pushing the right wing Republican agenda. Who the hell picked them to do this?

Yes, I have in fact ordered a copy of Shatnerquake. More info when I get it.

Ed Gross has published a revised edition of his 1991 book Trek Classic, a nonfiction look at the original series. I remember it being a pretty good book and will probably order the new edition. Tom Hultkamp's new cover art is strongly reminiscent of Mort Drucker's art for Mad Magazine. Which is not a bad thing.

Vanguard: Open Secrets

Well, I intended to do the usual longish review, but real life got in the way, so I was a bit distracted at times and utterly frazzled at others and didn't make any notes along the way. Sorry, Dayton, if you're out there.

Spoilers ahead...

What I can say is, Open Secrets was a solid entry in the series, with major developments in several storylines and some big changes for certain key characters. There's a bit of movement in the Shedai story, but T'Prynn and Reyes get a lot more attention. Nothing's neatly wrapped up, though -- this is a middle volume in an ongoing series, and so the big events don't get resolution, they change the course of the story and make you want to read what's coming next. What's next for T'Prynn, assuming the dekatrification actually worked as advertised? How did Reyes end up where he is at the end of the book? What happens next with the Shedai tech and the two remaining Shedai?

So: another really good read in a really good series. It'd be nice to see Vanguard catch on even more if the new movie really does bring some new fans to the books, because even if it's in a different timeline, it's as modern and contemporary as the movie, but with a lot more thought put into the story and the characterization. And no lens flares.

Oh, and I see I need to change the cover scan on the website. Kevin Dilmore appears on the title page and in the acknowledgments but not on the cover of the final version.

New Frontier: Treason

SPOILERS ahead.

Another New Frontier novel, another mix of comic book and soap opera. There are a few big developments here, but between PAD's writing style and events in other recent Trek novels, I don't think they had the resonance they should have.

Let's see... we get a character obsessed with a child's health and safety running off in a spaceship while under the influence of a mindstate that occasionally happens to their species, though we've never heard of it before. Okay, so Selar's obsessed with Xy's wellbeing and runs off with Robin Lefler's baby instead, but still, there's an echo of Doctor Ree's actions in Over a Torrent Sea.

There's a death of a regular character. Unfortunately, Selar's death is barely registering online, with all the craziness following Janeway's. She's one of relatively few NF regulars who actually appeared onscreen, and she was played by Suzie Plakson, so I for one am disappointed that she was killed off, and in a generic manner: screws up and puts someone at risk, sacrifices self to remove other person(s) from risk. That, at least, doesn't echo the Ree storyline.

Speaking of death, the late Si Cwan is back. His sister Kalinda was seeing visions of him but now he's taken over her body. There's no explanation, just a lot of "some people understand that there's more to all this than other people understand" stuff. His purpose in the plot is to psychically sense where his newborn son's been abducted to, and to put his widow through a lot of emotional hell. There must have been ways to structure the plot so that the NF regulars figure out where to go without a lot of mystical woowoo. (No, I didn't like the katra stuff in the movies either.)

And the book ends with hints of another big conspiracy involving at least one Starfleet admiral -- and, considering it involves aliens who can appear to be other people, there's an echo of the Founders. With everything that's been going on in the Trekverse, I'd have thought it would make more sense for PAD to focus on his Thallonian sandbox. Not that he's ever really developed Thallonian society and culture to any great extent.

Speaking of the conspiracy, once the story reaches the planet where the mysterious aliens who want Cwan and Lefler's baby are, we're solidly in comic book territory. One of the things that's always bugged me up about comic book writers is their tendency to take an ordinary word that means something related to something that needs a name -- a person, a planet, whatever -- and spell it funny. So here we have the D'myurj (i.e., Demiurge). The aliens who claim to uplift species, to guide them from corporeal to incorporeal existence, have the same name as the evil creator of the physical universe in gnosticism. Their foot soldiers, the Brethren, are described in a way that led me to think of Doctor Who's Sontarans, complete with probic vents, though there were a few key differences as well. But the action scenes felt more like comic book action than Star Trek action.

PAD is known for his dialogue, and it's obvious that he works on it -- not so much to give characters unique voices as to have characters provide setups for punchlines. There were a few times I thought, that's not what a real person would say in that situation, but if they'd said something else, no punchline. It's the sort of thing that can work when it's seamless and not overused. Not the case here. The fact that the characters don't have unique voices is highlighted by one paragraph in which PAD seemed to forget who's speaking. I wish I'd made a note of the page number, but there's a paragraph of dialogue that's obviously by Character A, but it ends something like "'... blah blah blah?' Character B asked." I vaguely recall another conversation between two characters where several lines aren't attributed, but when a character is finally named, if you read back to the last time a character was named, it should have been the other one.

All that said, there is some suspense, some humour that works, plenty of action, and the numerous regular characters, divided between New Thallon, the Excalibur, Trident, the Spectre, the Lyla, and Bravo Station, all have parts to play, which should make fans happy. If you usually like the New Frontier books, chances are you'll like this just fine.

Peter David and Robert Greenberger website problem

As posted in various places online, for reasons unknown, the websites of Peter David and Robert Greenberger (who have, among many other things, been very involved in the world of Star Trek books and comics) have been delisted from Google. This is not good. They request that people link to their sites (see above) and, better yet, link to particular items from the sites.

You might be interested in Peter David's bibliography or biography, for example. Or Bob Greenberger's bibliography or biography. If you're at this blog you must already have some idea who these guys are and what they do, but you may not realize how much other stuff they've done.

You may be entertained by some of PAD's blog entries, like this amusing one on Sarah Palin. Or touched by Bob Greenberger's recent post on the 21st birthday of his son Robbie, who died of cancer before he reached that age. I've never met either Peter or Bob in real life, but I've been reading their blogs for quite some time now, and they both seem like good guys. You can follow Bob's RSS feed or Peter's.

So come on, spiders and bots, index away.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Manga: Boukenshin

Spoilers ahead.

Tokyopop's first Next Generation manga, following three TOS volumes, is another mixed bag. Boukenshin (Adventurous Spirit) features three returning writers (David Gerrold, writer of "The Trouble With Tribbles," a few Trek books, and a lot of original SF; Diane Duane, writers of several Trek and fantasy novels; Christine Boylan, whose only previous Trek credit is in a TOS manga) and one new contributor, F.J. DeSanto.

Gerrold's story, "Changeling," is an underwritten sketch of a lesson story. Picard sends Wesley Crusher, on his first mission as an ensign, along with several of the senior officers on a mission to "the Labyrinth of Wisdom [...] the nexus of powerful energies." Despite being told to wait and be careful, Wesley keeps assuming he knows what he's doing and jumps on something that changes his appearance. Each time it happens, making him resemble (and act like) Geordi, Worf, and Deanna, he faces a challenge related to that person's skills. Turns out it was a holodeck lesson for the cocky young genius, who needed to be taught "about brains, courage, and heart." How the holodeck gave him Troi's empathic powers is never explained. It's a generic lesson story, making a cardboard character have some transformative experiences with some other cardboard characters. The dialogue is weak, too.

Duane's story, "Sensation," is a definite step up, as Deanna is faced with what at first seems to be a medical mystery at an archeological site on an alien planet. It feels like a TNG episode. The art by Chrissy Delk is also an improvement over E.J. Su's extremely minimal manga style art for Gerrold's story; Delk's work is stylized, and still in the manga mold, but shows more of a flair for characters and backgrounds.

Boylan's "The Picardian Knot" has an interesting idea -- Picard has become strangely unemotional after his mindmeld with Sarek -- but the story, involving an encounter with Romulan commander Tomalak and an ancient artifact, feels a little underdeveloped. And I really didn't care for Don Hudson's art.

DeSanto's "Loyalty" ends the book on an appropriately mixed note. Again, it's a good idea -- Riker is ordered to meet with several Starfleet senior officers and offered command of the Enterprise on the grounds that Picard, following the Locutus incident, is hopelessly compromised -- but several pages are wasted on making a point of the meeting being some kind of ultra mega top secret session. It makes perfectly good sense for some kind of inquiry to be held into whether Picard should be removed from his position; it hardly seems necessary to hint at it being Section 31-related. (I may be reading too much into it; it's all hush hush and Riker, in an unfamiliar part of HQ, escorted by silent security guards in nonstandard gear, asks "Never seen this part of HQ before, what's this section called?"but gets no answer.) Still, Riker manages to make the case for Picard. Some familiar faces, including Philippa Louvois and Elizabeth Shelby, appear as well.

So far, I think IDW's conventional American-style comics are doing a better job of telling stories that feel like Star Trek than Tokyopop's manga version. Perhaps a volume with only two longer stories and artists trying to be less faithful to manga conventions would allow the writers to tell deeper and better characterized stories with art that serves the story rather than demonstrating adherence to a particular style.