Not exactly the newest news, but...

There's a collection of essays about Farscape. There's a collection of essays about Firefly. They're both from BenBella Books, the company that published David Gerrold's Blood and Fire and reprinted his earlier Star Wolf books.

So I looked at their website and found this listed as a 2006 title:

Boarding the Enterprise, edited by David Gerrold and Robert J. Sawyer.

I googled and found nothing... except for a Sawyer blog entry from February. Oops. Canada's biggest-selling SF writer and I don't even read his blog regularly. Anyway, it's a collection of essays celebrating the original Star Trek's 40th anniversary, and according to Sawyer, the list of contributors includes D.C. Fontana, Norman Spinrad, and Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens, as well as a few science fiction writers and an astronomer. It's an interesting lineup, and I'll be looking forward to the book. I just hope it isn't tainted too much by the disdain for the post-TOS series that too many TOS fans seem to be spewing these days. If we're lucky, the subject simply won't come up.

I wonder if the Firefly and Farscape books from BenBella are any good....

(Now playing: John Foxx, "Spiral Overture," Cathedral Oceans III.)

Continuing the Star Trek anniversary fun...



But wait, there's more!



Click on the image above! For probably just a limited time only, you can relive the exciting book-and-record experience of the 1970s with Alan Dean Foster's Star Trek story Passage to Moauv. Each page of this web experience gives you a full page scan of the story in comic book format and a link to the corresponding sound file.

SEE:

• a blonde, caucasian Uhura!
• a black Sulu!
• a blue-skinned, humanoid, non-furry M'ress!

HEAR:

• a Captain Kirk who sounds nothing like William Shatner!
• M'ress overdoing the rolled Rs!

Revisit a simpler time in Star Trek, when there were no annoying references to other Trek TV series... because there weren't any! (Unless you count TAS....)

(Now playing: New Musik, "A Map of You," From A to B.)

It was 39 years ago today...

In the USA, anyway. I've read that Star Trek premiered a day or two earlier in Canada, but it's an American show, we can go with the American premiere as the official anniversary.

It's been strangely interesting watching a couple of threads on the TrekBBS. I'm used to clueless people who have no interest in or understanding of the original Star Trek but consider themselves Star Trek fans. But clueless people who are interested in the original Star Trek only and don't want any sign of any other Trek series tainting their original series novels? People who refuse to acknowledge that Paramount, not Pocket, owns Star Trek and decides what can be done in the tie-ins? People who've read one recent book going on about how much the recent books all suck? People ignoring the existence of New Frontier, SCE, Vanguard, Gorkon, Articles of the Federation, etc, so they can go on about the lack of diversity in the current Trek novels -- because the only diversity that matters is TOS novels that pretend the other series never happened?

It's not 1987 any more. I thought the diehard "There is no Star Trek but Star Trek, and James T. Kirk is its captain" purists had mostly gafiated or died off by now. Maybe someone should call an anthropologist to study this microsubculture before it dies of collective apoplexy.

(Now playing: Colin Newman, "Image," A - Z.)