But wait, there's more!



Two very different books of commentary on Star Trek have just been published. One's a light and breezy (with occasional undertones of cranky) quick read, in which a number of writers talk in different ways about the importance of the original Star Trek and occasionally mention or imply that everything else related to Star Trek since, say, 1968 has been worthless garbage. (I may be misrepresenting it, being less than halfway through, but that's definitely the tone established by Gerrold's and Sawyer's pieces.) The TrekBBS TOS Forum should love this one.

It'd be nice if David Brin had been involved in Boarding the Enterprise; Star Wars on Trial, while frustrating at times, was considerably more structured than this and a lot longer, too. I'm not sure, but I think this may be the shortest BenBella SmartPop essay collection I've bought yet. I've got their books on Firefly, Farscape, Narnia, and the aforementioned Star Wars on Trial. I'll be finished this book pretty quickly. And I suspect I'll have learned a lot less from it than I learned from Gerrold's The World of Star Trek way back when...

The second book is an academic critique of Star Trek and gender in the post-9/11 world, apparently. It looks, on cursory inspection, like it'll be a relatively straightforward read compared to some academic writing on Trek. Relke refers a number of times to the book that's pretty much the model of clarity in academic thinking and prose about Star Trek, the Barretts' Star Trek: The Human Frontier, which is a promising sign.