Vanity press/POD update

Ruby Moon-Houldson has her fourth "tribute" book listed on Amazon. Once again, she's calling it a great introduction to the worlds of Star Trek for new fans with input from her readers; if it's anything like the last book, it'll be 95% plagiarized from various websites and books.

While googling around, I learned something new: she has two Star Trek novels in print that I somehow missed before now, published by Booksurge, Amazon's vanity press/print-on-demand outfit, in 2003. It's possible her habit of borrowing the work of others and printing it in books with her name on the cover may extend to fiction as well -- one of the books is called Ni Var, the title of a short story by Claire Gabriel that was included in the first Star Trek: The New Voyages collection back in 1976.

Meanwhile, also at the fringes of Trek publishing...

A few more people have added to Lulu's growing collection of Trek material. Jan Netz has written a German-language story collection called Star Trek: Thunderland Sammelband, with a beautiful cover image swiped from one of the Ships of the Line calendars. Michael D. Garcia has compiled an anthology of fiction based on an online Trek role-playing game, Tales From a Parallel Universe, but the prose sample online isn't very promising. Mary Battle offers a collection of linked short stories, Lovers -- Lost and Found. Ro Laren is the main character, so I was briefly intrigued, but once again the prose sample warned me off. A shame, really: Ro Laren/Deanna Troi slash? It could have been glorious.

Back in the real world, Amy Lynn wrote My Life On Line, a personal memoir of her involvement in the Starfleet Lounge chatroom from 1995 to 2001.

Unlike last time, I've resisted the temptation to buy any of these.