Starfleet Library: Star Trek Books

The Romulan War: To Brave the Storm (spoilers)

2011-11-05T21:57:00.005-04:00

The end of the two-part Romulan War saga feels like the end to the Enterprise relaunch we've had thus far, tying up threads set up in the various Martin and Mangels then Martin solo novels. It's hard to tell whether the Enterprise post-finale books as we've known them are over now, but the last couple of chapters really provide a sense of everything being wound up and finished off.

But setting that aside, how is it? For me, at least, frustrating. For a number of reasons. First, I never thought the Romulan War really needed a big epic event, and according to some sources this was originally planned as a trilogy and later cut back to two books. As a result I'm torn between thinking it all went on too long and thinking the second book shows the signs of being something very different from what was originally intended. Where the first book, Beneath the Raptor's Wing, took a panoramic view of events, with a wide variety of perspectives, characters, and settings, To Brave the Storm has a tighter focus on the core characters. I liked the first book's approach at times, because we've seen plenty of space battles with our series regulars; we haven't seen the effects on politicians, journalists, and working stiffs.

And the tighter focus on the core characters leads to my second problem. I never had any issues with the decision to keep Trip Tucker alive. We never saw him die, just a centuries-later holodeck reenactment. So far, so good. But I never for one minute found anything believable about Trip Tucker, Federation spy in the Romulan Empire. Even when every character knew that Trip was a spy, they let him live for a variety of unconvincing reasons. And even after years of being a spy, judging by several scenes in To Brave the Storm, Trip never got the hang of talking or acting like anything other than the guy he was on TV. Every second character he encountered, at least, should have wondered what the hell was up with this guy, who looked right but talked cornpone and had inappropriate and blazingly obvious emotional reactions any number of times.

Third problem: though I liked some early Martin and Mangels books, I've found a lot of them, including several solo Martin books, seemed to just go on and on without anything happening. Characters move around a lot and talk a lot but nothing is really accomplished. And I very much had that feeling for the first half of this book.

But then something happened. Maybe it was just the need to deal quickly with all those balls in the air, but the last hundred-odd pages drew me in. I started actually enjoying the book and wondering how things were going to play out. A lot of the answers were predetermined -- Earth wasn't going to lose the war, Trip wasn't going to die, and so on -- but I started getting curious as to how the pieces would come together, and whereas I'd stalled any number of times in earlier chapters I raced through the last several chapters.

Overall, then, a flawed conclusion to a flawed series of books building on a flawed TV series. But one that ended up being a somewhat better experience than I was expecting.

(If you were wondering what I was on about last time, saying it could be hard to review a good, satisfying book, do you get it now?)

On a couple of recent novels

2011-10-30T09:47:00.002-04:00

Can it be that I still haven't reviewed A Choice of Catastrophes by Michael Schuster and Steve Mollmann and What Judgments Come by Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore? Apparently so. Well, then.

Sometimes there's no hook that really pushes me to blather about a book. Sometimes it just does exactly what it's supposed to do and I don't find an obvious angle. There's no odd new element, there's no fatal flaw, it's just a good, solid read. Both of these books fit that category. And that's not meant to be damning with faint praise. Readers shouldn't be disappointed by either of these books.

For fans who complain that there aren't enough standalone novels any more, that there aren't enough novels set during a TV series instead of expanding on what comes afterward -- shut up already. Read A Choice of Catastrophes. It tells a good, classic Star Trek-style SF story: some of the regulars are investigating a mysterious alien planet; others, including McCoy, are facing challenges of their own back on the Enterprise. It's familiar in the broad outlines but still fresh by virtue of being the first full length novel by the Schuster/Mollmann team. The focus on McCoy helps keep the book a bit different from most of the five year mission stories, as does the direction his storyline takes.

And, conversely, for fans who want serial storytelling with a cast of original characters, Ward and Dilmore are back with the penultimate Vanguard novel. And they tease us a bit with the structure of the novel -- the opening and closing are set after the end of the story, with two characters reuniting. So we can assume everyone doesn't get killed off, at least. Anyway, the book has a lot of storylines to deal with, and resolves at least a couple of them while setting things up for the grand finale. There's a lot of tension built up in certain storylines -- is Reyes going to make it out of this situation in one piece? is trying to communicate with powerful but apparently imprisoned aliens really a bright idea? -- and the tension is paid off in the book.

I think in some ways the book suffers a little by comparison to the last one, Declassified, because each of the four stories in that book could exercise a tighter focus -- a few characters, a single story. With What Judgments Come we're back to watching a lot of balls in the air, so early in the book the focus seems more diffuse, but things accelerate and come together. Only one book left. Damn.

IDW's new Star Trek comics

2011-10-30T09:06:00.003-04:00

After a long stretch with little in the way of new Star Trek comics, aside from two issues of the Infestation crossover, IDW has decided to restart things in a big way, with a new ongoing series and an event miniseries.

IDW's tie-ins to the new movie continuity have reportedly been among their best-selling Star Trek comics, which explains why their first ongoing monthly Star Trek comic is set in the Abramsverse. What's less obvious is why they've apparently decided that the way to avoid stepping on the movie producers' toes is to retell original series episodes in the new continuity, looking at how those stories might have happened differently.

The first two issues revisit "Where No Man Has Gone Before." I've got two main concerns about this story. First, two issues isn't long enough to retell an hour-long episode. The story is really rushed. More important, though, are the changes to the story. The basic premise is that these experiences will play out differently for this crew in this universe because of the changes Nero's time travel made to the timeline. But the changes made to "Where No Man Has Gone Before" feel arbitrary; they don't feel like they arose from the timeline changes, they feel like the writer just decided, okay, let's just say this character isn't involved, and let's say that character decides to do that, and so on. There are some moments when you can see that the writer is trying to think some things through -- the Kirk/Spock relationship is clearly a bit different -- but in two issues that can't be explored adequately.

As for the Legion of Super-Heroes crossover... well, one issue just isn't enough to go on, given how little happens. There's two parallel storylines setting up the crossover, one for the (original timeline) Enterprise crew, one for the Legion, both ending at the point where they realize they're in an alternate universe, with the two sets of characters not meeting yet. I'm not as excited as some people about this one because all I know about the Legion is that they're a bunch of outer space superheroes with names like Anti-Matter Lad. This story focuses on half a dozen of them, so I should be able to get enough sense of who they are as characters as the story progresses over several issues.

The art in both series is pretty good; no complaints on that score. What remains to be seen is how well the writers can get past the high concept elements of each series (retelling old stories with the new cast! crossover!) . I suspect the miniseries may do a better job at that, because it has several issues to tell one story. I hope IDW doesn't intend to use the first two issues of the ongoing series as a rigid formula -- every two issues, another episode arbitrarily changed.

Star Trek Vault: initial reactions

2011-10-23T16:07:00.002-04:00

Probably not fair to comment on this without actually reading the text yet, but from a cursory look, I can't help but think what might have been. Problem is, I'm not comparing it to other Vault books from Abrams, I'm thinking of something very different that few people reading this will have seen: Coronation Street Treasures.

Coronation Street Treasures (the edition we have, anyway; there's been more than one) is a hardcover book in a sturdy slipcase, a bit smaller than the Vault book. Inside the front cover is a pocket with an audio CD. A couple of pages in there's what looks like a handwritten recipe on stained paper tucked in another pocket; the next page there's a pocket in the form of a photo developer envelope full of holiday snaps. A few pages later, you can take out and examine a real estate agent's description of the Rover's Return pub and a restaurant review of the pub cut out of the local paper. Adoption certificate, wedding invitation, personal letters, hand-drawn lost dog flyer, greeting card, business cards, divorce papers, wedding certificate, employee time card, strip of pictures from a photo booth, anonymous threatening letter, confession, suicide note, all in all a few dozen removable artifacts set among the well-illustrated pages of a book that provides an introduction for new fans and a celebration for longtime fans.

One key difference: what's in the Treasures book isn't necessarily a recreation of something that actually existed. It's not about what happened behind the scenes or about merchandise for fans and collectors (though it's an example of the latter, obviously), it's about providing realistic artifacts from a fictional world.

The Vault has a few removable items, some of them quite welcome, but it takes a real world approach. Well, it is easier to provide documents from a current day soap than items from a futuristic world (though you could always try doing an iPad app, which reminds me of something else that needs some commentary). So it's a mix of examples of behind the scenes material, like blueprints and storyboards, and reproduced merchandise, like the small pamphlet that's an incomplete, miniature reproduction of an old colouring book, or the sample cards and stickers. It's sort of a mixed approach and, as cool as many of them are, there just aren't enough of the things (fourteen, according to the back cover). The book is well illustrated in colour but the text (and may Scott Tipton forgive me if I'm wrong, and I will get around to reading it) looks like yet another speedy runthrough of Star Trek's history.

And yet, as I look through it again, it is a very handsomely produced book. There are a few pictures you may not have seen dozens of times already. The animated series is not forgotten, which always earns a book a few points in my estimation. It may not be as loaded with photos of Trekstuff as, say, the auction catalogues I've seen, or some of the old Pocket coffee table books, but the removable stuff does add some fun to it.

Tentative summary, bearing in mind I've only browsed through it a couple times: if you've actually read all this, you should realize by now that you're probably the kind of person who will buy it, though you may want to look for a bargain price somewhere. And if you know someone who's just starting to get interested and doesn't know the show's history already, no doubt this would be a welcome gift.

Hephaestus Books

2011-10-23T15:43:00.002-04:00

Remember Alphascript? Betascript? Books LLC? They're all the same German company, and their books, which are flooding Amazon and other retailers, are Print on Demand collections of wikipedia reprints, sometimes collecting material so tenuously linked that no human seems to have been involved in their production at any point.

Amazon is now flooded with thousands more wikipedia books by Hephaestus Books. I don't know if it's the same company again, but the modus operandi is the same. As of today there are 187 Hephaestus books that mention Star Trek in the title. Here's partial titles from a few of their books (the titles are too long for Amazon to give in full):

Fictional Ensigns, including: Tom Paris, Hoshi Sato, Wesley Crusher, Amuro Ray, Ezri Dax, Nog, Travis Mayweather, Lalah Sune, Kira Yamato, Demora...

Fictional Heads Of State, including: Worf, Martok, Doctor Doom, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Gowron, Rom (star Trek), Judge Hershey, Highfather, Gaius Baltar...

Lorentzian Manifolds, including: Faster-than-light, Alcubierre Drive, Warp Drive (star Trek), Exotic Matter, Negative Mass, Breakthrough Propulsion...

Star Trek Novels, including: Star Trek: Vanguard, Harbinger (star Trek Novel), Summon The Thunder, Reap The Whirlwind (star Trek Novel)...

Shop carefully. Don't buy this stuff. With half an hour's work, if you really wanted paperback wikistuff, you could whip up a pdf and print it through lulu.com much less expensively.

IDW reprints Wildstorm

2011-10-23T14:44:00.002-04:00

Having apparently given up on reprinting older Star Trek comics (some of which were already collected in trade paperback more than once), IDW is now starting to reprint collections and graphic novels issuing from the previous company licenced to produce orignial Star Trek comics, Wildstorm. Though these books don't appear to be difficult to find in their original editions, The Gorn Crisis and Enemy Unseen are scheduled to be reprinted as part of a Classics line in 2012.

Time flies... turns out Wildstorm published their editions about a decade ago, so these reprints may be of some use to some fans. For fans not addicted to the print format, these stories are also available on the Star Trek comics DVD-ROM collection, which anyone even casually interested in Star Trek comics should have.

As for the contents of these two books... as I recall, The Gorn Crisis was, well, okay, and elements from it have been adopted into the current books continuity. Enemy Unseen collects three short series, one by popular novelist Keith R.A. DeCandido. The alien species introduced in his story has made occasional appearances in the books since then. I don't remember much at all about the other two, except that one introduced some kind of alien space ninjas that were rumoured to be intended as a recurring element in Wildstorm's Trek comics. That didn't happen. I was okay with that.

Obsessed With Star Trek

2011-10-22T13:16:00.002-04:00

There are a lot of Star Trek trivia quiz books, going back to Bart Andrews and Brad Dunning's unauthorized Star Trek Quiz Book, published by Signet back in 1977. But nothing quite like Chip Carter's recent Obsessed With Star Trek. The 2500 questions range through every season of Trek (including TAS) and every movie. But that's not the main selling point. Not only is this one a hardcover, it's got a computer module built in. And the answers aren't printed in the book itself; you have to use the module.

Apparently there's a series of these but it's the first one I've seen. And I like it. There are multiple game modes. You can play solo or with a friend, and can play question select mode, where you enter the number of a question in the book, or random mode, where the module presents a number (like 2371 in the book cover image), you look it up, then press the A, B, C, or D button to answer. The game tells you whether you're right or wrong and keeps score. I played through 100 random questions, solo, and ended up with a score of 77%. Out of those hundred questions, there were three repeats, which isn't too bad. I wouldn't have thought I'd do very well on Voyager or Enterprise questions, considering how few of those I've seen more than once (some I still haven't seen at all), but these aren't really aimed at the most hardcore fans.

The book's pages tend to have eight or so questions; there are a lot of black and white photo illustrations, and occasional big special questions preceded by a few paragraphs of text. As for the module, the batteries can be replaced.

I was initially a bit skeptical about getting yet another trivia book but the game element really does make this different. I'd expect it could be a lot of fun at fan gatherings, but you can be entertained playing solo, too. Worth a look. If the $29.95 US cover price seems a bit steep, try online retailers like Amazon.

Quick post

2011-10-22T12:24:00.000-04:00

Having fun again. Right now I'm updating the site with info on books that have actually come out since the last update in August while listening to the Cocteau Twins (try "Heaven or Las Vegas" if you've never heard them before). Stay tuned.

Maybe I should read TrekWeb...

2011-10-15T11:11:00.002-04:00

... then it wouldn't take a year and a half to notice that they borrowed a bunch of the content from The God Thing page, credited me for the material quoted from various books, misattributed at least one of the quotes, and didn't add anything of their own. So it's the first thing you find when you google for information about the book.

Oh, well. Maybe Gustavo was having a slow news day. And at least he didn't just plagiarize it and slap his name on it, as at least one fanzine bozo did.

But there are days when the whole idea of maintaining a site like the Complete Starfleet Library seems just so 1990s. You don't need one person to do a lot of work to build a website; you just need a whole lot of people to go through other people's sites for bits and pieces that can be incorporated into a wiki. Still, I'm not ready to give up on it yet.

Star Trek Magazine Ultimate Guide

2011-10-07T19:08:00.000-04:00

Part II of the Star Trek Magazine's celebration of Star Trek's 40th is out now. Like Part I (and if you missed it, go to Titan's website and buy a print or electronic copy), it's a look at every season of every Star Trek series, written by a wide variety of people. There are a lot of familiar names from the world of TrekLit. And me, too, writing about the second season of Deep Space Nine. (Big thanks to Paul Simpson for the opportunity not only to get in the pages of the mag, but to expound on some of my favourite filmed Trek.)

45 years

2011-09-08T19:27:00.001-04:00

Woot! 45 years! Woot!

Well, by this point in the day, what hasn't been said? Go watch some Star Trek. Or read some. Or play some. Or drink something that's unidentifiable, but green. The last few years haven't been the best for Star Trek, but I was there in the drought of the 1970s, and this is infinitely better. (Okay, the 70s weren't all bad.)

So go. Celebrate. And if you'll excuse me I have to go pop a DVD into the Xbox and watch some Star Trek now.

Of Trek and Who, continued

2011-08-14T16:41:00.003-04:00

Diane Carey's Star Trek: New Earth and Challenger books set up a series premise that could easily exist outside the Star Trek universe. The colony of Belle Terre is original to the New Earth miniseries and its single follow-up; so are all the characters remaining after the crew of the Enterprise goes back about its business. There's no Starfleet, no familiar aliens; instead, the Blood and the Kauld, introduced in the series, are the nearest alien cultures. A book about Belle Terre and Challenger, if it left out any mention of phasers, tricorders, warp drive, and other familiar Star Trek terminology, would be recognizable as Star Trek only if those two words were on the cover.

In the UK, if Star Trek had been a BBC series, Carey would likely be able to continue the Belle Terre saga through a publisher without a licence for Star Trek fiction, as long as the books retained only their original elements. In the USA, with Star Trek the product of an American studio, Belle Terre is the property of Paramount -- well, CBS now. Carey can't take it anywhere else and do anything else with it. She owns no copyright in any of it.

Doctor Who, on the other hand, operates under a very different set of rules.

As I understand it, anything created for Doctor Who by a writer not actually on the show's staff remains that writer's property, whether that writer is writing for the TV series itself or for a tie-in line. Starting back in the 1960s, Terry Nation was able to produce tie-in material about the Daleks as long as there was no Doctor or Tardis involved. There were Dalek books, annuals, comic strips; Nation negotiated with an American company to produce a Daleks TV series, but that never came to pass.

Since then, several organizations have produced audio dramas, films, books, and comics that use elements created by other writers; as long as they approve, and nothing else from the show is used, the only problem is finding an audience. There's even a K9 TV series with no real links to the Who universe any more.

Could this work for Star Trek, if the rules were different? As much as I'd like to think so, I don't think it work nearly so well. Doctor Who has an exceptionally flexible format -- it can happen anywhere in space or time; it can vary widely in tone and subject matter. Star Trek has some flexibility as well, obviously, but virtually all of it fits into a shared universe over a period of a couple of centuries and featuring a number of common cultures, organizations, and technologies. Maybe Gene Coon's estate could oversee tie-ins set in the Klingon Empire with no Starfleet or Federation involvement, which could arguably work. But something like Carey's Challenger with the Star Trek elements mostly removed -- or likewise for Peter David's New Frontier -- would there be a point? Why not just do them as independent SF series?

A connection to the TV series wouldn't necessarily help sales all that much. It might even hurt them. One of the Doctor Who-related spinoffs ended when the TV series returned, because fans who wanted something however distantly related to Who during its time off TV lost interest when the real thing was back. Other spinoffs have tried to minimize discussing the connection in order to attract readers who don't read tie-in fiction, though I doubt that's worked very well yet (unfortunately).

But there's something about the Doctor Who spinoff series that trumps all of that: they're fun, and they make the Doctor Who universe just that much richer and more wonderful for being part of it. (No one has ever declared what exactly counts as canon in Doctor Who, unlike Star Trek, so if I want to count it as a legitimate part of the Whoverse, there's no one to say no.)

Here's a look at some of what's out there.

Bernice Summerfield is the queen of this realm. She features in a number of the Doctor Who New Adventures novels, first appearing in Paul Cornell's Love and War. When Virgin Books lost the Doctor Who licence to BBC Books, they carried on with a Benny-centered New Adventures series that lasted 22 books. Meanwhile, Big Finish had started a series of audio adventures starring Lisa Bowerman as Benny. When Virgin stopped publishing the line, Big Finish took over, making some changes to the series premise and publishing six books in paperback before switching to hardcovers -- a couple of dozen or so now. Benny's an archeologist from a few centuries in the future. Originally a hard-drinking, sarcastic young woman with fake credentials, she's been a Time Lord's traveling companion, a university professor, an employee of the Braxiatel Collection, and more. She's had relationships good and bad. I've read all of her New Adventures and the first Big Finish book. My one concern is that there comes a point in the series continuity where you have to be following both the books and the audios to make sense of everything that's going on, and I haven't bought any of the audios. Yet.

Faction Paradox is a very different proposition. Introduced in the Eighth Doctor Adventure Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles, they're a strange organization -- a faction of time travelers playing a mysterious role in a future war between the Time Lords/Great Houses and the Enemy. They've appeared in several books published by Mad Norwegian, Random Static, and Obverse Books; a dozen audios from BBV and Magic Bullet; and, unfortunately, only two issues of a comic from Image. Where the Bernice Summerfield books are a continuing saga, Faction Paradox is a collection of very different things. There are recurring elements but the books are generally all standalones. The audios, on the other hand, tell continuing stories. There are also a lot fewer Faction Paradox stories, so, though the concept is much stranger, getting into them may be easier.

Time Hunter is a series of eleven trade paperback novellas. When Telos lost its licence to publish its series of hardcover Doctor Who novellas, a spinoff featuring the characters Honore Lechasseur and Emily Blandish from Daniel O'Mahony's Doctor Who novella The Cabinet of Light was developed. Time Hunter's home setting is England after World War II. Lechasseur is a fixer, Blandish a mystery woman from another time. They find they're able to travel through time together and have some mostly standalone adventures with occasional advances in the Blandish mystery arc. A few of the books use elements from Doctor Who, notably the Daemons and the Fendahl.

Iris Wildthyme is a character created by novelist Paul Magrs who appeared in a few very odd Eighth Doctor and Past Doctor Adventures. she's a mysterious woman who has regenrated a few times and who travels through time and space with her companions in a British red double decker bus that's slightly smaller on the inside. Though the character lends herself to comedy and satire, not least thanks to her prodigious drinking, Iris stories can be dark or affecting as well. Big Finish published one hardcover Iris anthology and a few audios. Obverse Books is publishing an ongoing series of Iris anthologies, also in hardcover, and her creator has published a full novel through snowbooks, possibly the first in a series.

And I haven't even mentioned Miranda or Senor 105 yet, but this post is already generating too many tl;dr responses...

A different kind of Prime Directive

2011-08-14T16:14:00.002-04:00

Well, this has to be an item with a limited audience. It's a very long meditation on being a father, on being a son, and on Star Trek, the original series. Dietrick's poem, based on fact, is about a man whose difficult relationship with his father had their shared viewing of Star Trek as a rare bright spot. There's a lot of philosophizing, a lot of remembering.

Dietrick has received some impressive praise for his work. Among others, Joe Haldeman, no literary slouch and no stranger to science fiction and Star Trek, praised it. As for me, poetry was never my thing (and me a former English major), but this is written accessibly enough that people who might not expect to like it might find themselves surprised. The book is subtitled A Renga Chain, though according to wikipedia a renga would be a collaborative work rather than something by a single author. At any rate, it could almost be read as prose despite the formatting on the page. Each section is haiku-like, three lines, usually with the standard five/seven/five syllables per line, but few are complete. Sentences may begin in the middle of one section and continue through a few more. Few sections stand alone. There's generally seven sections per page and roughly 120 pages to the main work. This is not some lightweight versifying, unlike so much of the contents of the 2000 anthology Star Trek: The Poems.

The book includes an introduction and a publisher's note by other people and an afterword by the author talking more about Star Trek and his father. The last page of the afterword, with Dietrick taking his father, now suffering from Alzheimer's, to meet William Shatner at a Star Trek con may be the most affecting moment in the book.

So who's it for? Well, middle-aged men trying to make sense of their issues with their fathers and their concerns about being a father themselves who spend time trying to figure out what it means to be a man -- and who grew up watching the original Star Trek -- could find something here. And so, no doubt, could their families. (My dad and I get along fine and I have no kids, so that lets me out.) People interested in seeing a supposedly highbrow artform take on supposedly lowbrow pop culture may also be intrigued. Or just anyone with an interest in Star Trek, in reading, and in encountering something different once in a while.

Cast No Shadow (spoilers)

2011-08-10T12:09:00.003-04:00

The Star Trek movies introduced two new characters who played an important role in a movie or two then seemingly faded away, despite the need for new characters and new relationships to keep things fresh. The first, Saavik, has had some exploration in a handful of novels and issues of the early 1980s DC Star Trek comics, but I can't help but think she deserved a lot more. Still, she's done much better than her fellow Vulcan, Valeris.

Valeris's part in Star Trek VI was originally written with Saavik in mind. I'm glad that didn't happen. Not only did that leave Saavik as an uncorrupted character who could be expected to continue playing a role in the series, it introduced a new character with a new and intriguing relationship with Spock. Granted, her part in the criminal conspiracy meant that she could hardly continue as a regular member of the crew, but it still seems strange that it should take twenty years before we'd get a book that explores her character.

But finally we have James Swallow's new novel, Cast No Shadow. It answers some of the questions and leaves others unanswered, but more importantly it does so in the form of a suspenseful espionage novel. A few years after the events of The Undiscovered Country, a terrorist attack in the Klingon Empire is revealed to have connections to the conspiracy that killed Gorkon and tried to prevent peace between Federation and Empire. And the best clue a young Starfleet Intelligence analyst named Elias Vaughn leads to a convict: Valeris.

Though Spock is prominent on the cover, he's not a main character. Vaughn (from the DS9 relaunch and other books) and Valeris are the main characters here, but there are a number of other interesting characters along the way, including operatives from a number of secretive organizations. But this is a rite of passage for Vaughn and a tale of possible redemption for Valeris, and some other characters aren't as fully developed as they could have been, including the terrorist group. For that matter, we don't get Valeris's own thoughts at some key points in the plot, which keeps up the level of suspense -- can she be trusted? What does she want? Why did she do what she did, and why is she doing what she's doing now? Swallow ultimately provides believable answers, though the Spock/Valeris connection is not explored in as much depth as the cover might lead a reader to expect.

Speaking of the terrorists... Swallow uses the Kriosians, whose canonical appearances I'd pretty much forgotten about. Turns out there's some dispute over whether the various Kriosians seen in Enterprise and two episodes of The Next Generation were all meant to be from the same civilization. My official Star Trek iPad app says no, other sources say yes, and Swallow goes with the latter. As always, he works in a lot of nods to continuity in unobtrusive ways.

The book avoids the obvious cliches. Valeris doesn't suddenly realize she was wrong then put everything right by sacrificing herself in some noble and fatal way. Vaughn doesn't instantly become the Federation's best field agent. Though the terrorists' final attack is obviously going to be averted somehow, because we know from 24th century Trek that the Klingon homeworld wasn't destroyed and the Klingon Empire didn't fall, how everything is going to play out is never predictable.

(I could call them freedom fighters instead of terrorists, but Swallow presents them as a relatively callous and unsympathetic bunch, as eager to kill Federation citizens as Klingons. That's arguably a weakness, as is the characterization of the individual Kriosians; they tend to the one-dimensional. Even with the importance of Federation/Klingon detente, I'd expect a bit more sympathy for the position the Klingon-occupied Kriosians are in from Starfleet officers.)

Overall, it's another solidly entertaining standalone novel. But I wouldn't mind another Valeris story with a bit more Spock in it. And more Saavik novels, dammit, with the Kirstie Alley Saavik.

Of Trek and Who

2011-08-05T21:13:00.003-04:00

If you're already a confirmed fan of both Star Trek and Doctor Who books, feel free to skip this one, you know this stuff already. But if you're one of the Trek fans who've been getting into Doctor Who since it came back in 2005 but haven't delved into the books, you may find it interesting.

One of the times I pondered the possibility of getting into Doctor Who books, as mentioned a couple posts back, I was put off by the fact that there were 80 Doctor Who novels already out there. This would have been around 1984-85 or so.

The biggest difference between the worlds of Trek and Who in book form back then was that the latter was still very much about novelizations. There was very little in the way of original Doctor Who fiction outside of short stories in the children's hardcover annuals. The novelizations themselves were also very different -- Star Trek episodes had been wrapped up in 13 short story collections by James Blish and, later, J.A. Lawrence and 10 books adapting the animated series by Alan Dean Foster, plus a few movie novelizations. The action in the Trek book world had moved to original novels.

Doctor Who, with its stories spread out from two to (once or twice) a dozen half hour episodes, didn't lend itself to the same approach. Instead, each serial was adapted as a novel, with the epic Dalek Master Plan eventually being adapted as two novels. It wasn't until after Doctor Who began its sixteen-year hiatus that the focus really shifted to original fiction, with the arrival of the New Adventures. (The three book Companions series, with an adaptation of the Sarah Jane TV movie and original novels centering on Turlough and Harry Sullivan, hadn't really come to much.) The New Adventures were a very different story.

The assumption behind the NAs was that the fans were growing up and were ready for a Doctor Who that was also growing up. The stories were more complex, incorporating occasional story arcs, and occasionally delved into decidedly more adult terrain than the TV series ever did. Equally importantly, with the show off the air, the books were effectively the continuation of the series, and supporting characters, like TV companion Ace, came and went. Writers associated with the TV series -- Terrance Dicks, Andrew Cartmel, Marc Platt, Ben Aaronovitch -- wrote for the series. The series was so intent on moving forward that the fairly obvious idea of a series of novels featuring previous Doctors took some time to materialize, but the Missing Adventures arrived eventually. So too did the Decalog series of anthologies.

The 1996 TV movie disrupted things considerably, not least by ending Virgin Books' Doctor Who licence and handing it to BBC Books, who started the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the Past Doctor Adventures. But the legacy of the New Adventures was secure. Paul Cornell and Gareth Roberts were among the writers who would go on to work on the revived Doctor Who TV series years later. Russell T Davies, the showrunner who brought it back, had written the novel Damaged Goods. Steven Moffat, who take over from Davies, wrote the Decalog short story "Continuity Errors."

The return of the TV series had an unfortunate effect on the books, though. The main BBC lines were dropped as the BBC discovered that the kid-friendly books based on the new show were selling several times as many copies as the fan-oriented EDAs and PDAs. Meanwhile, some of the spinoff lines (to be covered later) found that fans were no longer as keen on everything Who-related they could find now that a new series was on TV again. (Those books were often great, but they weren't always cheap, while the show on TV was free.)

The situation in 2011, for a book fan, is not nearly as good as it was ten years ago. There are a few books a year aimed at different children's age levels. There's been one big, adult-oriented novel, Michael Moorcock's Coming of the Terraphiles, and the possibility of one or two more a year. There's a small number of Torchwood books, which are often quite good, but there's no Doctor in them. Likewise the small press adventures of Iris Wildthyme and Faction Paradox.

The core Doctor Who book lines were at their most essential when the show was off the air. I can't help but wonder what would happen if a new Star Trek series became a huge hit, like the movie did -- what effect would that have on the books? Maybe not a lot; the movie didn't. But it's hard to say for sure. I'd prefer to have a healthy and popular line of books and a healthy and popular TV series.

Writing Sarek: after six years, some good news

2011-08-05T21:02:00.002-04:00

From the latest Conlan Press update, news on Peter Beagle's long, long, long delayed Writing Sarek (I paid for my copy six years ago):

WRITING SAREK — Hardcover Edition
Completion of this book was regrettably delayed by the same Beagle family issues mentioned above. We took advantage of the delay to dig even deeper into the show. That effort yielded more internal Star Trek: The Next Generation production memos related to the "Sarek" episode, several variant drafts of the original script, and a set of unused story pitches that Peter had completely forgotten he had made to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. All of these discoveries will be included now, and we couldn't be happier about that.

Writing Sarek will be wrapped and sent to the printers shortly after manufacturing begins on The Last Unicorn CD audiobook and Two Hearts.

May actually happen before we reach the seventh anniversary of my order, though I dunno... waiting seven years has some serious significance for Vulcans.

On tie-in books in general

2011-07-31T20:06:00.003-04:00

I don't remember the first Star Trek episode I ever saw. I do remember the first Star Trek book I ever read: Mission to Horatius by Mack Reynolds. The second was Star Trek 3 by James Blish.

I read two tie-in novels about The Invaders in the early 1970s. I didn't actually see an episode of the TV series until the first two episodes were released on VHS to cash in on X-Files mania.

I had seven of eight Tom Corbett Space Cadet books before I realized they were based on a TV series. I didn't see any episodes of the show until the early 1990s.

I've read books based on Get Smart, Rat Patrol, Mission: Impossible, Man From UNCLE, Hawaii Five-O, and yes, Bewitched.

I read the original edition of the novelization of Star Wars. The one with the Ralph MacQuarrie cover released six months or so before the movie came out. I read it as soon as I could find a copy, well before the movie premiered.

Looking at the bookcase to my right, I've got books based on dozens of SF and fantasy TV series and movies. It's not because that's all I read, by any stretch. No, there are two reasons. First, when I started watching SF the only way to have your own preserved version of a show or movie was to buy tie-in books. Second, much more important, and still relevant: a good tie-in book makes the experience of the TV series or movie deeper, richer, and more rewarding. TV and movies can be immersive, but they can also be watched with a fraction of your attention while you eat supper, or IMDB that actor you can't quite place, or make out with your significant other.

Reading demands your attention. You have to immerse yourself more deeply. You can't turn the pages while doing something else and take for granted that you saw enough out of the corner of your eye to keep you from losing track of what's going on. Plus, books aren't on TV for free, and they aren't usually over in an hour. You invest more time and money in reading.

Writers reward that effort and that immersion by going where filmed media can't -- inside the characters' thoughts; in places that aren't practical for filming; they can deceive us and keep us in suspense in different ways from film. Good tie-in writers are giving us a different experience, one we could only have this way, and one that lets us go back to the filmed original with a new perspective on the characters, the setting, the stories.

Sure, sometimes what you get instead is a hack job by someone who doesn't seem to have ever seen the property in question, who gets the basics wrong, who does things that are simply ridiculous. It happens. But it happens in what some folks call canon, too -- look at all the character abuse in Star Trek V, for a start.

If I really like a TV series or movie and I think there's more stories there than we're getting, if it's something that lends itself to expansion in print form, then I'm interested. Sometimes I'm disappointed, as I was by the failure of shows like Farscape, The X-Files, and Babylon 5 to produce strong and lasting tie-in lines. But sometimes the books exceed my expectations. There are whole universes of storytelling in series like Star Trek, Doctor Who, and (though I'm not so much of a fan) Star Wars in book form that go far beyond the filmed canon. Take Vanguard, for example. Bernice Summerfield. And so much more.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm in the middle of a Torchwood novel that fills in some of what Gwen and Rhys were doing between Children of Earth and Miracle Day.

Going slightly off topic for a few posts

2011-07-31T19:55:00.004-04:00

Greetings from the nonexistent Prydonian Academy Library website. There's not much Trek stuff to report on these days, so please indulge me in a temporary detour.

Looking back ten years ago...

The summer of 2001 was a great time to become a Doctor Who fan. The show had been off the air for years, the McGann TV movie was already five years in the past, and it must have looked to some like a dead franchise. It was anything but. The BBC was publishing Eighth Doctor Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures every month, and you could still find a lot of the New Adventures and Missing Adventures novels in bookstores. The Chapters bookstore chain carried a lot of videotapes and DVDs in its stores and you could find plenty of Doctor Who episodes for sale. Big Finish was producing new monthly audio adventures with TV cast members. Telos was just a few months from starting its line of novellas. Doctor Who Magazine was publishing a new issue every four weeks.

On the fan side, the Internet offered plenty of information and interaction. The rec.arts.doctor-who newsgroup was still alive, Outpost Gallifrey was already going strong, and Daniel O'Malley's Timelash Tardis Library website offered all the information someone trying to get a sense of books, videos, and audios could need.

And you could find so much stuff in bookstores. Virgin and BBC books in the chainstores, Targets in the used bookstores, VHS tapes in video stores. You could find any number of things before you'd need to go to Amazon, eBay, or specialized retailers like WhoNA.

There was no sign of any new TV Doctor Who on the horizon. But did it matter? With 26 years of TV to explore, dozens of original novels, comic strips, audios, and more, Doctor Who was very much alive.

And so it was that in July of 2001 I finally took the plunge I'd contemplated for many years.

In the late 1970s, I first heard of Doctor Who in newspaper articles and, no doubt, Starlog magazine. I saw the occasional Target (and Pinnacle) novelizations and was curious but thought they looked too much like children's books. And I couldn't find the show on TV. I saw my first episode in the summer of 1980 in a hotel room in Thunder Bay, Ontario, while we were making our way across the country, having been transferred from Edmonton, Alberta to Summerside, PEI (about 5000 km of driving). All I remember is Tom Baker and lots of wandering around caves. I was only moderately intrigued.

A few months later I bought the first four Marvel Premiere comics to reprint UK Doctor Who comic strips, but they didn't hook me. I picked up a copy of Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors and, again, wasn't quite hooked. At university I went a little deeper, watching the occasional Tom Baker episode on PBS with confirmed Who fan Peter Jarvis. (We may have watched Full Circle; I know I remember him explaining E-Space.) I was tempted by the books again, but there were eighty of them by then. It seemed like too much to take on.

But I watched a few Pertwee episodes in the summer of '85, including The Daemons, and in '86 bought and read The Doctor Who Programme Guide Volume One. Starlog was running more articles on UK SF TV series, and now I was in a city where Doctor Who was on TV regularly. This was the perfect time to get hooked, right? I saw at least a couple of Davison episodes, possibly a Colin Baker episode, and still didn't get hooked.

In the early 1990s the New Adventures books started appearing on bookshelves, New, original novels that looked more adult than the Target books... but no. Then one of the contributors to a Star Trek mailing list I was on started getting her Doctor Who novels published, so I picked up a Kate Orman book, looked at it, and thought, I don't think I'll have a clue what's going on if I read just this one and didn't buy it. Another missed opportunity.

1996: the TV movie. I watched it, though I did some flicking between channels. I liked it reasonably well. Another opportunity missed.

So why July 2001? A few things, People posted about Lovecraftian elements in Doctor Who novels in alt.horror.cthulhu. I was doing a little research into the various Who book lines for a feature article on SF tie-in books on my website. There wasn't much good SF TV happening, with Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 over and X-Files way past its prime.

Anyway, on July 6, I bought one of the novels with Lovecraftian elements, The Taking of Planet 5. There was so much happening in that book -- it was not only part of an ongoing story arc, it was also a sequel to an episode I had never seen -- that I was lost. Utterly, But I was also fascinated. I bought a few Who books at a used bookstore a few days after buying ToP5. I asked Laura if she's watch a Doctor Who video with me -- she'd watched it occasionally many years earlier, and said sure. I bought The Stones of Blood on VHS.

In the next month I bought more than 60 Doctor Who-related books. Half a dozen or more videos. I started buying Doctor Who Magazine. There was no turning back.

IDW news

2011-07-24T15:24:00.003-04:00

After a long run of months with next to no Star Trek comics (aside from some reprint collections and two issues in the Infestation crossover), IDW has made some big announcements you already know about.

There's been a bit of a fuss over the Legion of Superheroes crossover. It doesn't bother me; it's not going to be an ongoing thing, and it's not unprecedented (see the X-Men crossovers). The idea doesn't appeal to me mainly because I don't know anything about the DC universe; I currently read their Vertigo titles, and when I was young and read superhero stuff I was much more a Marvel reader. But this isn't likely to hurt a comic book line that reportedly has had really low sales. Not that this will change that. Maybe there are a lot of Legion fans who haven't previously bought Trek comics who will pick this up and be intrigued... but they won't have an ongoing original series Trek comic to latch onto. It's not a gateway for new readers, it's a dead end.

The bigger development is the ongoing monthly set in the new movie continuity. The bestselling comics have been those that tied in with the movie, so it make sense. IDW switched over to an ongoing monthly for Doctor Who some time ago, though not exclusively.

My concerns here are that, well, I haven't enjoyed the movie continuity comics. I liked the movie itself a lot more than many of the first ten Trek movies, and I was excited about the Pocket novels that ended up getting canceled at the last minute -- I still want to read those some day. I believe it is possible to get some compelling, original, and worthwhile tie-in fiction in this new continuity. I don't think I've seen it yet. The YA novels are entertaining in their own right, but they're more Hardy Boys at the Academy than anything uniquely Star Trek. As for the comics, Nero and Spock: Reflections made next to no impact and Countdown made plenty, all of it negative.

If it's true that the comics will visit original series stories to see how they play out in this changed timeline, though, I'm a lot less convinced that this is going to have much lasting appeal. The movie worked because it treated its elements as something new and not tied down to the past. The best argument for the comic, really, is that it may keep the movies from following the same path.

Vanguard Declassified

2011-07-24T14:44:00.002-04:00

I'm not sure Declassified really needs to be reviewed. Either you're already a Vanguard fan, in which case you've already read this book, or you aren't, in which case this isn't the place to start. (That would be Harbinger, the first novel in the series.)

Declassified breaks up the storytelling by offering four novellas, each set at a different time and featuring different key characters from Vanguard's large cast. And while it's the work of the series' longtime braintrust, there's a surprise or two -- Ward and Dilmore fly solo instead of together, and original editor Marco Palmieri contributes one of the novellas. The stories range from before Harbinger to after Precipice, the most recent novel, and they're not just a casual side trip -- very significant events in the lives of the characters and in the Vanguard story arc appear in these pages. And with only two more novels before Vanguard reaches its end (as planned by its writers, not dictated by sales or any other external force) it's very much a core book in the series. Each of the stories has its pleasures; if anything, the narrower focus of the individual stories may make this an easier experience than the novels sometimes are, as they have so many characters and storylines to balance. It's a good approach, one that would have been worth keeping in the mix if Vanguard continued beyond two more books.

If anyone who's followed the series was wondering whether Marco could write -- don't worry, he doesn't let the team down. As an editor he seemed more concerned than some of his peers with his writers' style, not just their plotting, and that same care is evident here. It's just too bad that the scheduled end of the books makes any more Marco contributions to Vanguard very unlikely.

As for the issue of Vanguard coming to an end: it's good news and bad news. I like the idea that we'll be able to look back at Vanguard as a story, and one that didn't overstay its welcome. More series, and I'm not just thinking in Trek terms, could use that kind of thinking. That doesn't mean I'm happy about Vanguard ending, though; it's been one of the most successful runs of books in the Trek line in the last decade, and I'd happily keep on reading more. Hell, maybe they could do the occasional novella collection like this one, revisiting unexplored scenes throughout the Vanguard timeline.

Oh, and Declassified was the first book I read on my new ebook reader, a Kobo Touch. I bought the print version, of course, but Laura decided we needed dedicated ereaders because the iPad is too backlit, too shiny, too heavy for reading in certain situations. We bought them just as I was about to start reading Declassified, which made it an obvious starting point (damn that tiny print -- you're getting value for your money, but my eyes aren't getting any younger). It was a pretty good experience, with one exception. I'm used to looking at paper and turning pages and just tuning out the physical reality of reading a book. I've been doing it more than forty years now. With the ereader, I was more distracted by the mechanics of the process, holding a different kind of artifact and engaging with it in a somewhat different way. I'll get used to it, and I can easily imagine situations in which I'll be very glad to have an ereader. But for Star Trek and some other core collecting areas, I'll still be buying print.

Starfleet Library update

2011-06-05T13:11:00.004-04:00

Well, that was overdue. Anyway, a number of items have been added or updated, and the schedule page has also been updated.

Some of the new items for 2011:

The other stuff you probably know about already. (But who would have imagined, a year or two ago, a schedule almost completely devoid of IDW comic collections?)

If I hadn't already more or less given up on being a completist kind of collector, some of this year's unauthorized books might have been the tipping point. We have two books about politics and Trek written by someone whose knowledge of English isn't very good (and whose knowledge of politics I'm not convinced about, either). We have a collection of 285 David Letterman-style top ten lists related to Star Trek, none of the examples of which I've seen have actually been funny. And a thesis published by a company known for charging too much and claiming the authors' IP rights, which is available online in its original form for free.

I may just go for Prime Directive, though -- it's not expensive and it has a very positive quote from Joe Haldeman on the cover. Still, book-length poems about Star Trek as a lens for reviewing one's relationship with one's father aren't my usual reading material. Never hurts to broaden one's horizons, though.

New Star Trek auction catalogue -- free!

2011-06-04T10:15:00.002-04:00

Propworx has an online auction of Star Trek uniforms, props, etc, today. For their first big auction they produced a very nice hardcover auction catalogue and gave a way a pdf version. This time they're doing the pdf version only. It's not quite as nice as the first, but it's probably still worth getting if you're interested in this kind of thing.

As far as I know, from a book collecting perspective, the first Propworx catalogue and the two-volume Christie's catalogue are the only Star Trek auction catalogues in print. They may not be easy to find, but anyone interested in behind the scenes stuff, props, costumes, and all that sort of thing really should have them.

A couple of sample images, a matte painting I wish I could afford and a model detail:

Someone make it stop, part one

2011-05-29T10:48:00.005-04:00

So I'm trying to search through Amazon to see what kinds of Star Trek books are coming out in the near future, and I'm being swamped by two phenomena: wikipedia reprint books and ebook-only works with no actual publishers. For now, let's look at wiki books.

There are hundreds of books available that will give you a random sampling of wikipedia articles related to Star Trek (some rather tenuously). There's just no point in trying to collect them, and I can't see much value in trying to include them in the Complete Starfleet Library listings. There are too many coming out too quickly, and many of them may not even exist as printed books yet; the only way this kind of operation could be making money is if most of the books are print on demand. Well, that and the absurdly high cover prices -- if you really want printed wikipedia articles, it wouldn't be all that hard to print them yourself through lulu.com, and it would almost certainly cost a hell of a lot less. For that matter, you'd have as much a legal right to sell your versions and compete with the Germans (Alphascript, Betascript, Books LLC, etc).

Maybe that's what Holly Simon and Project Webster represent: wikipedia books with a little more effort put into them than the Alphascript etc books. Or maybe it's just their latest fake author and publisher name. "Holly Simon" is the author of a lot of books on a lot of subjects, all wikipedia article collections; the main difference is that the books appearing under her name are much more reasonably priced and look as though they've been organized and titled by a human rather than an algorithm. Instead of Books LLC titles like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes: List of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes, Far Beyond the Stars, Duet, The Maquis, The Search with a generic, text only cover for $67, you can get The Unauthorized Guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with an actual DS9-related cover image for a US list price of $21.75. The phrase "high quality wikipedia articles" on the covers of the latter, though, suggest it may well be the same outfit, making more of an effort to produce something that will actually sell. More worrying is the claim in the blurb at Amazon that they're not only using stuff under Creative Commons licences, they're planning to use more licenced and public domain material. Still, I can almost see some value in including things like these on the site, at least as a warning, because they look more like legitimate books.

Oh, and now there's WikiFocus books: ebook versions of wiki articles. Yes, now you can pay for electronic versions of free electronic content.

If Project Webster or WikiFocus have websites explaining who they are and what exactly they're doing, I haven't found them yet.

I wonder how many fan-run databases that aren't wikis are being harvested for these things. Like mine, for example. I know some of my content was published in a fanzine under someone else's name a few years back. A lot of people operate under the assumption that everything on the web is public domain, which is simply not true. But with so much of this stuff flooding Amazon, how would we ever find out?

And another thing: boy, wouldn't it be nice to be able to filter all these wikibooks out of my Amazon search results.

The fun returns

2011-04-23T16:53:00.002-04:00

Warning: there may be spoilers below. I don't know, I haven't written it yet, so be careful.

The Typhon Pact books had some great moments, but they tended to be pretty grim. And after books like the galaxy-changing Destiny trilogy, some fans at TrekBBS and elsewhere have found that the Typhon Pact books were just dark and depressing loaded on more dark and depressing. Personally, I don't agree that the book line has overdosed on the dark side... but that doesn't mean I'm not ready for some lighter reading. And for two months in a row, we've gotten books that (despite occasional moments of sadness and loss) bring back the fun.

David McIntee's novel Indistinguishable From Magic is packaged as a Next Generation novel, but it focuses on Geordi LaForge and Montgomery Scott aboard the engineering ship Challenger. There are a lot of guest appearances, too, from Berlinghoff Rasmussen, Guinan, Leah Brahms, and many more. It may seem a bit much, but the story was originally planned to be two separate books, so the fanwank^H^H^H^H^H^H^H continuity references seem a bit more concentrated than they might otherwise have done.

Basically, what we have here is something of an epic-scale Starfleet Corps of Engineers kind of story, with the old science fictional sense of wonder working on overdrive. It's fun, dramatic, funny, surprising, and touching. It does suffer a bit from having two books' worth of plot crammed into one book, but it's a big book. And I enjoyed it. After reading McIntee's Doctor Who fiction over the last decade (and some Trek- and Space: 1999-related stuff), I'm glad to see him get the chance to deliver a full-length Star Trek novel. And it's no disappointment. May it be the first of many.

Also not a disappointment, despite a somewhat awkward structure and truckloads of continuity porn, is Christopher Bennett's latest, Watching the Clock, the first novel to centre on Dulmur and Lucsly of the Department of Temporal Investigations, as introduced in DS9's "Trials and Tribble-ations." Bennett takes characters who had only a few minutes of screen time and makes them believable characters. He also provides a lot of thoughtful explanations for the many seemingly incompatible uses of time travel in the last 45 years of Trek history, and manages to wrap up some long-unanswered questions -- not least about the confused mess that was Enterprise's Temporal Cold War.

Bennett, more than most writers, sees and writes Trek as science fiction, emphasis on science, and this book is no exception. He's clearly done a lot of thinking, and he shows some of his homework, but keeps the book flowing well enough that it never devolves into a series of expository lumps.

Like Indistinguishable From Magic, Watching the Clock has its share of dark moments, but again the overall tone is one of fun and adventure, of taking the elements of Star Trek to build a big, epic story across years and light years. Both books are set firmly in the current Trek books continuity, but they're not about exploring what happens next in any of the ongoing storylines. They're big fun standalone adventures, and they should make a lot of fans happy.

Incidentally...

2011-02-06T14:32:00.002-05:00

I don't have to rely on the iPad any more. PCs are fixed, and there's been a lot of updating at the Complete Starfleet Library website. Still need to work on the upcoming books schedule and the 2011 page, though.

Typhon Pact (spoilers)

2011-02-06T14:21:00.002-05:00

The Typhon Pact was born of an age of chaos and loss, of confusion, but also eventually of hope that stability might might be found despite the new order of things. And that's just the editorial kerfuffle at Pocket Books. The editor who first laid the plans for this miniseries, Marco Palmieri, was laid off because of the financial problems in the financial industry; the editor who took over, Margaret Clark, was herself laid off a few months later; the editor who apparently oversaw the conclusion of the project, Jaime Costas, is gone now too.

Meanwhile, in the Star Trek universe of the 24th century, the devastation wrought by the Borg incursion in the Destiny trilogy continues to affect the Federation and other civilizations. The four standalone volumes of the Typhon Pact miniseries focus on the major political development of the time, the founding of a new but very different kind of federation, one composed of races at best unlikely to join the United Federation of Planets and at worst openly hostile to it. Each volume involves familiar Star Trek characters in some kind of conflict with a Typhon Pact member society.

So how well does the miniseries work? I've been surprised by the amount of negativity expressed at TrekBBS's TrekLit forum. There are two issues: the quality of the books as novels, and what they say about the state of the Star Trek universe.

Looking at the books as novels, they're an interesting mix of storytelling styles. David Mack's Zero Sum Game focuses mainly on one Trek regular, Julian Bashir, bringing him into a dangerous adventure of interstellar espionage. Michael A. Martin's Seize the Fire is a relatively conventional Trek novel, with William Riker and the crew of the Titan in a Prime Dircetive crisis precipitated by the Gorn. David R. George III's Rough Beasts of Empire follows two threads, Spock's quest for unification between Romulus and Vulcan complicated by the Romulan split and the Typhon Pact, and Benjamin Sisko's quest for a new life several years after the events of the last Deep Space Nine novel. Dayton Ward's Paths of Disharmony builds on elements from the Deep Space Nine saga, the Typhon Pact, and (spoiler alert) the Vanguard series in a suspenseful story of interstellar politics centered on the Andorians and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

As individual books, I liked them all, to varying degrees, though I thought Seize the Fire was the weakest. The basic story felt too familiar, the Gorn situation too reminiscent of the Andorian situation, certain plot elements not given as much attention as perhaps they should have been. Zero Sum Game and Paths of Disharmony were pretty much unputdownable. In the middle, Rough Beasts of Empire had a lot of great stuff happening but the Spock and Sisko threads were unbalanced and never really connected. (Oh, and the mention of Mr. Roby's bookstore next door to Joseph Sisko's restaurant was a nice touch, even if it turns out to be inspired by one of the real world residents of New Orleans named Roby -- and there are quite a few, interestingly enough -- instead of anyone closer to home. Only the second book I've encountered with the name Roby in it.)

As for the other issue, the state of the Star Trek universe, there's been a lot of talk about how dark and unpleasant things are in the Trekverse now, and yeah, things are pretty bleak here. Bashir is unknowingly in Section 31's hands; the Romulan split -- which had half the former Empire being more friendly with the Federation -- has ended and the reunited Empire is solidly aligned with the Pact, making Spock's reunification crusade seem more pointless than ever; Sisko has left home and family because of his understanding of the Prophets' message that he would know only sorrow if he married Kasidy; the Andorians have seceded from the Federation.

Well, yeah, that's bleak. But none of it is conclusive. We don't know where things are going next. In the meantime, we've had stories with suspense and surprises, exploration of alien cultures (especially in Zero Sum Game, which really developed the Breen), and a lot of character development.

After the first three books I was still on the edge about how well this miniseries worked. It wasn't as tightly focused as we've come to expect from recent Trek in some respects; the standalone nature of the stories made it hard to get a sense of the current status quo. But after the fourth book, I'd call it a success, overall. Not the best run of Trek novels ever, but often both gripping and enjoyable. Readers who don't know or care about the issues with the editorial revolving door and other issues, like the cancelled (or, I hope, postponed) Abramsverse novels, would probably have a better experience than those of us who worry too much about what happens behind the scenes and what it all means.

Now if only we had some sense of how long we wait to find out what happens next. I miss the days of Trek editors who posted in TrekLit hangouts.

Propworx

2010-11-26T19:14:00.005-05:00

(Yeah, I still haven't fixed the PC with Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and all the website-related files that died a few months back. But hey, I have an actual job again.)

Back in 2006, Christie's, the auction house, had a massive auction of Star Trek stuff, and commemorated it with a full colour catalogue of two trade paperbacks. This year Propworx held a major Trek auction and did a full colour catalogue in book form as well -- one volume, but hardcover instead of paperback. It's a very attractive coffee table book that could well appeal to the people who bought Star Trek 365 and the Haynes Enterprise Manual. But if you're not sure you want to buy it, Propworx is letting you have a pdf for free.

You can't beat a deal like that, but the book is worth having in print form anyway. Look at the downloadable version and think how nice a hardcover edition of it would be. And it's cheaper than the Christie's catalogue was, too...

Five years now...

2010-08-29T12:25:00.002-04:00

Yep, it was in August of 2005 that I placed my order with Conlan Press for Peter S. Beagle's book Writing Sarek, which would reprint the script of his Next Generation episode "Sarek" and tell the story of how it was written. Still no word when it will be available, except that it won't happen until some other long-delayed Beagle projects are released.

But that's the nature of small press projects, I suppose. Except for all of the ones I've bought that were published in a lot less than five years after sending in the money.

StarTrek.com, revised edition

2010-07-15T20:12:00.002-04:00

StarTrek.com has relaunched. The look is new, but some of the core stuff looks similar to what was there before. There are a couple of new features, though: From the Blogosphere, a news feed of posts from selected Trek fan websites, and Fan Sites, a directory that prominently features three of the big Trek fan websites (TrekMovie, Trek Today, and Trekweb), along with about a dozen "additional sources," one of which is described as follows:

The Complete Starfleet Library

Star Trek book collectors and readers can find information on every Trek book published in English, fiction and nonfiction, from 1967 to next year. Online since 1999, it covers over a thousand books and has special feature sections, including a look at dozens of unpublished books.

Well, I think it's cool, anyway. Thanks, Bill and Kristen at CBS.

So, what's next?

2010-06-21T21:14:00.005-04:00

I don't have the latest issue of Star Trek magazine yet, the one with the big TrekLit update (I will, though; I never miss it). So I'll borrow the 2011 schedule from the also worthwhile TrekMovie.com and make some random comments.

January

Star Trek: New Frontier: Blind Man’s Bluff
by Peter David

There are times I think, wow, New Frontier is still going? Why? Sure, it was groundbreaking at first, it proved that a books-only series could work, it's even been entertaining at times. But it's had over a decade, and the books schedule is a more crowded place than it used to be. I wouldn't mind seeing it wrap up and let other books have a shot. Others will disagree, of course, and there's no doubt that when things are a bit rocky, the sure thing has more appeal than something new.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy – The Competitive Edge
by Rudy Josephs

I'm expecting something fairly innocuous, but you never know -- not all young adult fiction is as nice and squeaky clean as Pocket's 1990s forays into YA Trek, and books based on the new movie should make an effort to catch some of the movie's attitude. I like a nice old-fashioned space academy story as much as the next guy, as my collection of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet books will demonstrate, but if we're going to be denied the Abramsverse books we were expecting from Alan Dean Foster, Christopher L. Bennett, David Mack, and Greg Cox, let's hope these books manage to capture some of the spark of the 2009 movie.

Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Paths of Disharmony
by Dayton Ward

Dayton Ward (yay), Typhon Pact (tentative yay), and something to do with the Andorian situation developed in the DS9 novels and Destiny... sounds like something to look forward to.

February

Star Trek Enterprise: Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor’s Wings
by Michael A. Martin

Reprint. But. I've never really understood the need for an in-depth exploration of the Romulan War; I got all I needed from "Balance of Terror," and Enterprise the TV series only muddied the waters. I'm also not a big fan of Martin's books. There's a discussion over in Jade Pagoda, the Doctor Who books mailing list, about stories in which there are many events but nothing much actually happens, and that's the sense I've gotten from many of Martin's books, including some of his collaborations with Andy Mangels. They're big event-packed books, but when they're done, I'm hard-pressed to remember anything in them that actually moved the plot forward in a meaningful way. I liked some of the ideas and some of the scenes in this book, but overall it still fits that pattern. And I am so done with Trip Tucker, secret agent, that I almost wouldn't mind if he got killed in a dumb and pathetic way all over again.

March

Star Trek: Indistinguishable From Magic
by David A. McIntee

IIRC, McIntee once believed that he wouldn't get to write a Trek novel because of some Pocket animus towards writers of unauthorized Trek nonfiction (he wrote Delta Quadrant, an unauthorized Voyager guide). No idea what to expect from this engineer-heavy novel, but I've liked several of McIntee's Doctor Who novels, and his Space: 1999 novel was one of the highlights of that line of books. It's a promising sign that the Trek line under Jaime Costas isn't just playing it safe by sticking with frequent contributors to the line and easily categorized novels.

April

Star Trek: DTI: Watching The Clock
by Christopher L. Bennett

This has the potential to be a lot of fun, though Bennett's not the choice I would have expected for something like this -- he's great at the big, widescreen, hardcore science fiction Trek, but for a book being spun out of an episode like "Trials and Tribble-ations" someone more gonzo might be expected. At the very least, though, I expect this to have some unique and thoughtful takes on time travel in the Trek universe.

May

Star Trek Voyager: Children of the Storm
by Kirsten Beyer

New Frontier, Enterprise, and Christie Golden's Voyager novels have me wary of letting a single author control a series -- but after Full Circle and Unworthy I want to see what else Beyer has in store for Voyager. She's achieved any number of things I wouldn't have expected from Voyager. Not just making me care about my second-least-favourite Trek series, but finding a way to make what seemed like the worst of bad ideas -- sending Voyager back into the Delta Quadrant -- seem like a good idea. This is another one I'm eager to read.

June

Star Trek Vanguard – Declassified
by Dayton Ward, David Mack, Kevin Dilmore, and Marco Palmieri

Novellas by the three Vanguard novelists and the former editor who created the concept? Oh, hell, yeah. Too bad it couldn't be absolutely massive and allow a couple new writers into the sandbox, but Vanguard has been one of the best things to happen to Star Trek since it went off the air. If this isn't one of the highlights of 2011, it'll mean someone's tampering with the timeline.

July

Star Trek: A Choice of Catastrophes
by Steve Mollmann and Michael Schuster

New to full-length Trek, but not new to writing Trek, and not new to writing about it, either. These guys are smart enough for their standalone TOS novel to be worth waiting for.

August

Star Trek New Frontier: Blind Man’s Bluff
by Peter David

Only a seven month wait for the mass market reprint, but I just know people will be bitching about having to wait at all. Suck it up, cupcakes.

September

Star Trek: Cast No Shadow
by James Swallow

This one sounds unusual: Valeris and a Starfleet intelligence op to be named later. Swallow's been consistently good, and it's an intriguing concept -- why hasn't anyone done much with Valeris before now?

October

Star Trek Enterprise: Romulan War: In Shariel’s Jaws
by Michael A. Martin

Has anyone said just how many volumes there'll be? Because even though I'm not a big fan of Enterprise, I can think of a lot of other storylines that could be explored instead of this. But I already went on about that.

November

Untitled Vanguard novel #6
by Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore

It's Vanguard. I'm sold already.

December

Star Trek Mirror Universe: Rise Like Lions
by David Mack

Not really a Mirror Universe fan -- haven't even read Sorrows of Empire yet -- but it's Mack, which makes up for it.

So, what's new?

2010-06-20T19:13:00.002-04:00

I was looking for a job, and then I found a job, and heaven knows I'm miserable now. Well, not really. Not at all. Just busier than I've been in a long time. But any chance to quote a Smiths lyric. But as for the lack of posting here, busy just about sums it up. Doesn't help that some of the Trek books of the last year or so have left me feeling underwhelmed, though.

I didn't care for Inception, though I'd hoped to. But one of the major characters, Leila Kalomi, never came to life for me, and the whole ecoterrorist plot was embarrassingly inept. It didn't feel like a thought-out extrapolation of anything from the real world; it was, if anything, the Emily Litella version ("now what's all this fuss about endangered feces?"). Or maybe the thematic sequel no one wanted to "The Way to Eden."

The Unspoken Truth disappointed me because, although I've been waiting a long time for a Saavik novel, I haven't been waiting for a Robin Curtis Saavik novel; I really didn't like her take on the character, but Margaret Wander Bonanno's book is very much a portrait of the Curtis Saavik rather than the Kirstie Alley Saavik.

The Children of Kings just kind of baffled me. As Stern's author's note at the end points out, it doesn't really fit into the TV continuity, but it doesn't fit in the new movie continuity either. But what it does with that freedom from continuity is, essentially, a perfectly normal Trek novel, almost interchangeable with any number of older standalone Trek novels. What's the point?

For me, at least, all three of these books were lost opportunities, chances to broaden the horizons of original series Trek fiction that didn't pan out.

In other news, the PC with Dreamweaver and the website working files is out of order at the moment. I certainly hope it can be restored, but it'll be a little while before all the latest news is reflected there. Good thing I did a lot of work on it a few weeks ago.

And another Smiths quote to end this brief update: there's more to life than books, you know, but not much more. Not much more.

More about The God Thing

2010-01-30T13:43:00.002-05:00

Here's what I just added to the page for The God Thing, Gene Roddenberry's unpublished Star Trek novel:

It had forgotten its name. That had been forgotten those eons ago when it first knew itself to be dying. Stars without number had ignited and faded as it searched this prison galaxy for a way to youth and wholeness again. Although it would be eons more before it would cease to move and think, that end now seemed perilously close.

So begins the manuscript purchased by a collector who prefers to remain anonymous. (He hasn't given me a copy and he probably won't give you one either, so don't ask.)

The collector writes that he saw the manuscript listed on eBay and won the auction. (Frankly, it never would have occurred to me that this manuscript might show up there, so it's no surprise that I missed it.) Here's what he won:

Pages 1 - 68 are photocopies (page 40 is missing). Marked GR and dated between 8/19/1976 and 9/10/1976.

Pages 69 - 152 are mostly on onion skin typewritten pages, initialed "W.K.," and dated between 10/29/1976 and 12/21/1976. Each of these 83 pages is also autographed by Walter Koenig, as is the title page.

In general, the descriptions of the novel on your site are accurate, except possibly Chekov having become captain.

When reading it, I was struck by two things: one being the controversial nature of the material as well as the similarities to ST:TMP in its various incarnations (novel, script, and film). Some of the similarities include:

Kirk on leave in Africa
mention of Egypt Israeli Museum
Spock on Vulcan (Gol) training, seeking to eliminate the last vestiges of his human half when he senses the entity
Enterprise in space dock being refit after completion of 5 year journey
Kirk promoted to Admiral
Transporter accident killing a crew member, this one beaming with Kirk
Starship (Potemkin) destroyed by entity
Entity approaching Earth
Kirk reassembling our familiar crew and taking control of Enterprise
McCoy left StarFleet and became a veterinarian. Similar quip by McCoy as to why he became a vet - "it's the only field of medicine that has completely sensible patients (a line like this appears in the first draft of Star Trek: In Thy Image)

So, a good portion of the Roddenberry portions of this novel were recycled for use in ST: TMP. Or taking a different perspective, this novel (based on Gene Roddenberry's 1975 draft) really represents the genesis of ST:TMP, when combined with elements from "The Changeling" and Genesis II's "Robots Return."

So maybe, Star Trek: The God Thing has been here all along.

I asked the collector whether he could confirm the presence of some specific scenes described by various sources, like the big confrontation between the entity and Kirk in which the entity presents itself as different images before appearing to be Jesus Christ, and, for that matter, the odd kinky scenes Susan Sackett describes.

Re: Susan Sackett - yes, it is confirmed. Pages 58-63 have Kirk engaged in what could be best described as nude oil wrestling with three women. "They were nude of course except for their paragame sandals, and young women that way had a disconcerting way of looking quite different. It disconcerted Kirk that the thought made his own genitals tighten against the metallic mesh which protected male vulnerability during the game" (from page 59).

Also confirmed about the entity appearing first as the prophet Hamid, "a tall striking Masai black man of thirty years" "born in the calendar year 1969 in time to give his life in 1996" (from pages 130-131). The entity then transforms himself into Jesus of Nazareth after it realizes that no one knew of Hamid.

Another sample from the manuscript:

Kirk stood near the center of the crowd at the bus station. He felt it important to blend in and so he smiled and applauded lightly as the pretty eight year old in the [illegible] costume mastered her simulated fiber wool jump rope with a succession of graceful little hops. The innocence of the wide eyed child was both a joy and a sadness to him. "The passing of things dear," Kirk thought. There would be no freedom from sin, from guilt for a world overlorded by a vengeful self-proclaimed God-thing. There would be fear, there would be treachery. There would be death and destruction in the name of sanctity. There would again be the Dark Ages.

And the manuscript ends with this paragraph:

As the men approached, those in waiting began to applaud. Even as they pumped his hand and embraced him warmly, Kirk's eyes were raised toward the stars. Next time, he thought, next time... please... let it just be Klingons.

The collector included some photos, with much of the text blurred; he's worried about violating copyright. In this case, given the use of only three paragraphs from a manuscript of 152 pages, and given the more or less scholarly nature of this web page, I'm confident that we are well within the bounds of fair use.

Based on the information and the samples, in addition to all the information gathered over the years, it looks very much like publication of the manuscript would be something of an anticlimax, given the similarities to The Motion Picture and Roddenberry's lack of experience writing prose fiction. That doesn't mean I wouldn't love to have a copy, whether just a photocopy or an edited and revised published version.

Updating the website

2010-01-24T16:17:00.002-05:00

I've spent a few hours today working on the Complete Starfleet Library website, with at least an hour or two more to go. Books missed, books published, books cancelled, books postponed, new info about The God Thing, etc etc etc. Lots of stuff to work on.

One thing I've decided... I don't want to move the four JJverse novels recently postponed to the Lost Books page, because I have a hard time believing they won't appear eventually. So I created a "date unknown" page for the website. There are a few other items that'll go there, too, though I strongly suspect some belong on the Lost Books page by now.

I'd like to think that that Writing Sarek book I paid for in 2005 will appear some day, but the last time the publisher specified a date, it was to say the book would definitely be out in 2008; the last time he mentioned the book at all, it was basically to ask people to buy other Peter S. Beagle stuff from them to help them get the late stuff published. Hello? You already have my money.

Well, back to Dreamweaver... what to listen to? I've been listening to Brian Eno, Zelienople, Demdike Stare, and Peverelist. What next, I wonder...

IJWTS...

2010-01-19T21:07:00.002-05:00

"Expanded Universe" is a Star Wars term. Not Star Trek. The wacky multilevel pseudocanon Star Wars has doesn't resemble the Star Trek books situation at all.

(And while I'm at it: Star Trek 09 is called Insurrection. Last year's movie is called Star Trek. If that's too long, try ST XI or ST 2009.)

Normal service will resume before long

2010-01-12T20:54:00.003-05:00

For anyone who's noticed the absence of new posts lately, well, I got a job after a few months of unemployment. Being a real world librarian has taken some of my Starfleet Library time, but I'll find a balance. And if not, well, I've got a contract job for a few months. Might have too much free time again before too long. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the job.

Oh, yeah. That new Vanguard novel, Precipice, by David Mack? More of that kickass Vanguard intensity discerning Trek fans have come to know and love, with some big developments in the ongoing story arc. Five books in, and the Vanguard series hasn't had a dud yet.

Haven't read The Sorrows of Empire yet, but it's another David Mack novel, so I won't be waiting too long. Have to finish The Panda Book of Horror first, though....

Don't buy these books!

2009-11-19T20:15:00.002-05:00

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.)

Synthesis

2009-11-14T20:56:00.002-05:00

Real life's been getting more interesting lately, so I haven't posted about the latest Titan novel yet... and by now I don't remember many of the details I intended to mention. So this is a feeble excuse for a review. But what the hell.

Titan is a special series, in a lot of ways -- it's TNG if that show had really been about exploration, and if it had been more of an ensemble drama. It's Star Trek as widescreen science fiction. Swallow follows Christopher Bennett's lead in telling a big Titan story of exploration and a fascinating alien culture, with ideas bubbling up everywhere (though I had the sense Swallow's weren't as grounded in hard science as Bennett's), and at the same time it gives a number of characters good scenes and development. It's a novel that stands well on its own while also reflecting what's come before, in the other Titan novels and in Destiny. In short -- too short, it deserves a longer and more thoughtful review -- it's a damn fine entry that captures everything that makes Titan so appealing.

The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing

2009-11-05T13:45:00.003-05:00

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

2009-10-28T10:18:00.002-04:00

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

2009-10-28T10:16:00.000-04:00

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

2009-10-26T19:30:00.003-04:00

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

2009-10-26T08:38:00.003-04:00

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

2009-10-17T21:01:00.003-04:00

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

2009-10-16T16:52:00.002-04:00

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

2009-10-16T15:44:00.004-04:00

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

2009-10-13T09:15:00.003-04:00

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.

Comics, Gender and Sexuality

2009-10-07T15:44:00.004-04:00

Just got a couple of books from Amazon. Here's some quick thoughts, because it may be a little while before I read them.

Alan Porter's book is the first guide to Star Trek comics and comic strips in print. (If you're interested in Trek comics and aren't already familiar with Mark Martinez's Star Trek Comics Checklist site, go check it out and bookmark it already.) This is a large trade paperback, well illustrated with comic covers, sample panels, and original artwork. Each section of the book begins with a page or two providing background on the publisher and the series described, followed by entries for each issue (or storyline, for the comic strips) giving the stardate, title, issue number (where applicable), writer, artists, and a synopsis. The chapter "Creating Trek: The Interviews" includes material from interviews with over a dozen comic creators.

I should point out that this is a US$40 paperback, which strikes me as a bit much. I paid C$27 at Amazon. Shop wisely.

David Greven's Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek: Allegories of Desire in the Television Series and Films is the first full-length book to examine representations of homosexuality in Star Trek. However, early in the introduction Greven makes it clear that this is anything but a definitive work on the subject, saying "I freely admit that I'm not a follower of Deep Space Nine." Sure enough, a check through the index reveals very few references to DS9. Greven's main interest is in Voyager, which is no doubt why, when he announced the book on TrekBBS, he did so in the Voyager forum in a thread called "My new Trek book, especially for VOY fans." So, nothing about the Garak/Bashir subtext, and "Rejoined" is only mentioned in passing. Not quite as bad as writing a book called Race in Star Trek that ignores DS9, but it still strikes me as a lost opportunity.

And since I pointed out the price of Porter's book, I'll also say that US$35 for Greven's trade paperback is expensive, too. Porter's publisher, Hermes Press, aims at the collector market, Greven's, McFarland, at libraries and universities. McFarland has been making more of an effort at selling to fans over the last several years, though; the first books I bought from them was Susan Gibberman's 1991 book Star Trek: An Annotated Guide to Resources on the Development, the Phenomenon, the People, the Television Series, the Films, the Novels and the Recordings, which was pretty much typical of bibliographical works aimed at the library market: hardcover, no dustwrapper, no illustrations, and quite expensive for the time. The next one was John Kenneth Muir's book on Space: 1999, published in a similar format in 1997 but reprinted in 2005 as a trade paperback with a colourful cover. By then McFarland had started publishing a lot of books of interest to casual readers, not just libraries, and some of those books are decidedly more fanboyish than academic.

Ship of the Line

2009-10-06T09:28:00.000-04:00

Digging up some old reviews. Funny how often people still talk about this book.

In 1988, Diane Carey wrote the first Next Generation novel, Ghost Ship. Not long after that, she hit the convention circuit full of stories about what a jerk Gene Roddenberry was and how gawdawful The Next Generation was. In 1990, after TNG's third season (the year of such classic episodes as Sarek, Who Watches the Watchers, The Offspring, and Best of Both Worlds part one), as Carey ranted at Toronto Trek about how gawdawful TNG still was, other con guests, like A.C. Crispin and Starlog's Dave McDonell, were visibly taken aback. They made it clear they disagreed, and most of the fans present seemed to disagree as well.

Not surprisingly, Carey didn't write any TNG novels for the next few years. She did write a novelization of Descent, but until 1997's Day of Honor crossover she pretty much ignored TNG. For that matter, in her Day of Honor contribution, she pretty much ignored TNG, putting all her creative energy into a holodeck story about the American Revolution.

So naturally, in 1997, she was the one who wrote the first novel about the Enterprise E, the first novel to follow the events of ST: Generations. Carey's distaste for The Next Generation in general and Captain Jean-Luc Picard in specific permeates every page of the book. Picard is nominally the hero of the book, of course, so she is usually subtle, but the scene in which Picard interacts with an interactive, holographic Kirk program is a good counterexample. Carey's goal here is to teach Picard that Kirk was the greatest starship captain ever, and she does so by making Picard misconstrue the events of the holodeck program -- a recreation of the events of "Balance of Terror" -- and fills Picard's head with thoughts of what a one-dimensional, blustering, violent slob Kirk is considered to be in Picard's time. She does the latter so that Picard can continue to discover how wrong he was and marvel in Kirk's genius and multifaceted personality; she does the former to criticize modern Trek and Picard's style of command. How? Picard keeps accusing Kirk of starting a war with the Romulans, even accusing Kirk of firing the first shot in the altercation, even though the holodeck program begins with the destruction of the neutral zone outposts by the Romulans. He also accuses Kirk of being too bold and daring, implicitly portraying himself as someone who can't make a decisive move without being told by Starfleet Command what that move will be. There's a kernel of truth in that, but it's something that was increasingly less true as TNG went on.

Carey's antipathy toward TNG, or perhaps her ignorance of it, also comes to the fore during the confrontation between Bateson and Riker. When Bateson rants about knowing more than Riker does about Klingons, Riker doesn't mention his stint as first officer aboard a Klingon ship, the fact that the Enterprise under Picard had a Klingon security chief, or the role that the Enterprise and its crew played in the recent Klingon succession and civil war. All of these things are relevant to Riker's point, but Carey has set him up to take a fall, so none of that is mentioned. Carey thinks Bateson is right, so she ignores everything on TNG that refutes him.

Consider Bateson's remarks on p.199-200: "You look down your noses at the conflicts of the past as if we had wars because we thought they were fun. I've got news for you. It's no fun. Someday you're going to have to fight unthinkable odds too, and on that day you'll remember me. You'll find out that there comes a time when you have to stand up and hit somebody." One word: Borg. Has Carey never seen BOBW? Riker has been through shit that Bateson can't imagine. But again, she has to put Riker and TNG in their place, so again Riker doesn't say what should be said. It's a classic case of the author ignoring character and continuity to make her point.

Carey's usual stylistic quirks are somewhat muted in this novel, fortunately, making her prose more readable than in most of her previous novels. Still, there are some appalling clunkers that should have been red-pencilled by someone somewhere along the way. Take, for example, "After the horror of the statement thudded to the deck at everyone's feet, Mike Dennis was the only one to speak." [p.32] (Alas, she doesn't mention whether the horror of the statement broke on impact, or bounced, and there's nary a word about who cleaned it up.) The number of people who drawl their sentences is a bit disconcerting, especially when Picard does it (who can drawl with that kind of accent?), but at least no one is "plied with shame." And as usual every character in the book shares Carey's obsession with the Age of Sail, peppering every conversation with some bit of sailor's lingo. Oh, and of course one of the finest touches in this book comes when Carey quotes herself for several paragraphs on p.143, and again on pp.225 and 321, providing a perfect example of her ego and her sailing obsession. Self-indulgence, thy name is Diane Carey.

Something else worth noticing in this novel: women are almost nonexistent in this book. Troi and Crusher are present, but they have about as much to do in this novel as they do in the movies. Bateson's crew is apparently all male; likewise Kozara's. On the one hand it seems odd that someone whose first two Trek novels featured a strong female character as narrator would slight women so often in her other novels. On the other, it makes a certain sense: if Diane Carey can't be one of the main characters (Piper is a classic Mary Sue character; i.e., a wish-fulfilment device for the author), no other woman can, either.

All in all, pretty much a typical Diane Carey novel. Why is she, of all people, writing TNG? Maybe it's because John Ordover isn't a big fan of The Next Generation, either, as he's said on Compuserve and elsewhere. I can only wonder what Carey's books are like before they get edited... assuming they are actually edited.

At the time (1998, apparently) I hadn't seen the TNG episode with Bateson in some time, so I left out another problem with the book because I wasn't sure of my facts. In the book, Bateson's arrival in the 24th century follows a dramatic fight for survival against a Klingon attack. There are no women on the bridge. Bateson is frantic, the bridge a place of chaos. In the episode, Bateson is calm and relaxed, and the crew visible behind him include two women, neither showing signs of fleeing a desperate situation. In other words, Carey didn't even bother to stay consistent with the one little minute of actual canon material about Bateson. (As for the remark about "plied with shame" -- one of her earlier novels used that odd expression several times.)

Invasion!

2009-10-06T08:39:00.002-04:00

An old review from rec.arts.startrek of a miniseries that kicked off the crossover trend and still gets discussed fairly often...

"Emotions Crashed Across His Face"

Time for a quick review of the Invasion miniseries. The subject line is a quote from the stylistically challenged Diane Carey. She failed to report whether the crashing of emotions across one's face results in bruises, abrasions, or, for that matter, sound effects. Still, it doesn't sound pleasant.

Diane Carey's TOS novel is, as might be expected, a paean to the embodiment of all that is good in mankind, James T. Kirk. I'm not quite as fond of Kirk as she is, so the scenes in which characters tell each other how superior Kirk is because he befriends The Other (as a general concept) while others fear and flee it didn't do much for me. And her usual military fetish results in a long, drawn-out battle sequence beginning the book. It has essentially no relevance to the Invasion storyline; instead, it's a minisequel to the TOS episode Friday's Child, inserted to show what a fighting he-man hero Kirk is. Boring.

Fortunately, the novel picks up the pace when the focus is on the Furies. Carey, unlike the other writers in the series, describes the Furies as a civilization in their own right, and has at least one sympathetic character among them. They aren't just cardboard cutout bad guys. Of course, the key gimmick is ludicrous. All races in the Alpha Quadrant have a dramatic, instinctive sense of revulsion when they see the Furies because the Furies invaded our worlds five thousand years ago, when we were primitive, and we modelled our evil deities on them. This is patently ridiculous for at least three reasons: it assumes the existence of some kind of genetic race memory (a la Quatermass and the Pit); it assumes that all cultures in the Alpha Quadrant were at the same point of early civilization 5000 years ago; it assumes that our usual visual representation of the devil as a goat-man with horns is 5000 years old instead of a few hundred years old. The concept of Satan in the Judeo-Christian world is a hell of a lot less than 5000 years old, and it's changed a lot in that time, too. It doesn't help that the basic idea is a bit too reminiscent of the TOS episode Who Mourns for Adonais and the TAS episode How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth, in which we learn that some gods of legend were actually visitors from space. IIRC, the TAS episode The Magicks of Megas-Tu covers similar ground, with a devilish character named Lucien.

So the concept is dumb. Carey, though, keeps the action moving well enough to gloss over the unlikeliness of the whole thing, and only occasionally reminded me of how much I usually hate her books.

On the other hand, I usually enjoy the Rusch & Smith books; they aren't the best, but they're always at least competent, and often quite good. But their TNG novel for Invasion is a bit of a dud. Suddenly the Furies are purely evil, one-dimensional bad guys, and not terribly interesting. So they pour on the action and set the stage for the Voyager novel. Readable, yes, but when Diane friggin' Carey makes me sit up and pay attention, I expect to be blown away by Rusch and Smith. It didn't happen, though the end of the book is reasonably intense.

I've enjoyed most of LA Graf's stuff, but their DS9 novel was so much the highlight of the series that it surprised the hell out of me. (Of course, I am a DS9 fan, but even so...) Among the remarkable things in this book: the Furies don't appear, but their ancient adversaries do, and they're a lot more intriguing than a bunch of bad-tempered demons; there's a twisty, complex time travel element that starts the novel with a hell of a mystery and has a good payoff later; attention is paid to the unique political and character dynamics of DS9; the dialogue is often sharply crafted, the characters well drawn. I like it. Anyone who doesn't give a flying wallenda about the Invasion series as a whole should still give this one a look. It's closer to being a standalone novel than the other three.

Dafydd ab Hugh wrote one of the most intense DS9 novels yet, Fallen Heroes. His next novel was a bit of a letdown. His Voyager novel is somewhere in between. There's intensity to spare, and audacity on a cosmic scale (tossing the Furies' Delta Quadrant adopted homeworld to one of the Magellanic Clouds is almost over the top), but it suffers in comparison to the DS9 book. Time's Enemy had a hell of a lot more going on than just some worry about what the Furies were up to. Final Fury is a more tightly focussed book, which may make it better for some readers, but the characterization and dialogue weren't as strong as LA Graf's.

As for Invasion as a whole...

Worth reading? Sure. It's not literature, but it's entertaining, despite its silly premise. There wasn't really any need to tie the ancient representations of evil stuff in; any large invading force would have done equally well. The Soldiers of Fear is the only book that would need extensive revisions to get rid of that element, and it was the weakest entry in the series anyway.

In closing, from best to worst: Time's Enemy (DS9), The Final Fury (Voyager), First Strike (TOS), The Soldiers of Fear (TNG).

If someone had worked with Ms. Carey to improve her idiosyncratic prose style and dampen her ardor for Kirk, First Strike could well have taken second place. But, apparently, the writer of such unforgettable gems as "Emotions crashed across his face" and "Worf was plied with shame" is too popular with the average Trek consumer to worry about the quality of her prose. As seems to have happened on a much larger scale with Stephen King and Anne Rice, Carey can write badly and fans will buy it anyway, so why bother to edit.

But I digress. Overall, a worthy effort.

Unworthy

2009-10-04T18:37:00.004-04:00

Spoilers ahead...

Okay, it's not the exciting revelation that Full Circle was. But then, how could it be? Full Circle restarted the Voyager line that had so far greatly disappointed me and made me care again; it put characters through a once-in-a-lifetime kind of emotional wringer; it surprised me by making what I used to think was a dumb reset button idea -- sending Voyager back to the Delta Quadrant -- work.

Unworthy, then, had to deal with higher expectations, and it had to do so without the kind of fireworks Full Circle had. It is, really, the first book in the new direction of the series. It had to finish getting all its pieces into place, answer some outstanding questions from Full Circle, and set up some business for future books in the series. And it did that, generally very well (a little predictably in a few cases), by doing a solid Star Trek exploration story and letting all the character stuff come into play in and around that story.

Were there bits I didn't like? Well, I wasn't crazy about the Chakotay/Seven/Icheb scene in Seven's mind early on; a little too woowoo for me, though I seem to recall it was reasonably consistent with some actual televised woowoo. And I think some of the pieces came together a little too easily by the end of the story, but at least the Tom and Harry storyline and the blaming Chakotay storyline reflected the fact that it shouldn't be easy for everyone to move past some of the events of the last few years.

Overall, though, if I'm not quite as blown away as I was by Full Circle, I am nonetheless quite happy with Unworthy. We get to see how the fleet works together. We learn more about newer characters like Eden, Batiste, and Cambridge; the latter in particular still comes across as way too much like Hugh Laurie as House for comfort, but damn if it doesn't work. I wonder whether future books will follow up on the possibility of a Cambridge/Seven relationship.

Seven is only one of the familiar faces to get a lot of development here. She's dealing with the post-Caeliar letdown and trying to work out who she is and what her place is, and she resolves those here. Chakotay, B'Elanna, and Tom also all find their places for the foreseeable future, and though the idea that they're all back off into the Delta Quadrant together again does seem like a bit of a reset button, the stories that lead them back there all make sense for the characters.

The alien culture that features in the story is an interesting one as well: symbiotic aliens who hope to be found worthy of joining the Borg, but who weren't really worth assimilating, because from the Borg perspective, they just don't have anything to offer. However, the Voyager gang seem to vacillate a bit on whether they're bad guys or just good guys who have been misled and too bad about all the death and destruction they've caused in neighbouring systems. They don't seem to need The Eight to do some heinous things, and I'm not convinced that The Eight are a problem in need of revisiting any time soon. Disembodied consciousnesses that can take over bodies have been done a few too many times in Trek.

Janeway, by the way, is still dead, but she's often in characters' thoughts. Tuvok is mentioned a couple of times as well.

The title, Unworthy, comes into play in a number of ways: the aliens are unworthy of being assimilated. Seven thinks she was found unworthy of joining the Caeliar. and there are a couple of story threads that involve people deciding other people found them unworthy of being trusted. Hell, even Reg Barclay feels unworthy; he's interested in a woman but can't imagine she'd reciprocate his feelings.

So, overall, an enjoyable book that tells a story complete in itself while also moving various series arc elements forward, a book I enjoyed and that has me looking forward to the next book in the series and (if they're not the same thing) Beyer's next Trek book, whenever it may come.

Star Trek: The Human Frontier

2009-10-02T19:51:00.002-04:00

Doesn't look like I ever posted this on the blog. It's an Amazon review from a few years back of the nonfiction book, a critical look at Trek.

An academic critique of the four Star Trek series, this book has three main sections. The first explores the use of the nautical metaphor in Star Trek. The second considers the many ways in which Star Trek has explored the question of what it means to be human. The third part discusses Deep Space Nine and Voyager as post-modern.

Though that may sound a bit dry, the book is well worth reading, and the authors provide a number of insights into Star Trek. Unlike some critics, the Barretts do not overuse academic jargon, nor do they blindly condemn Star Trek as racist, sexist, colonialist, or fascist. Their approach is more nuanced, and the fact that they seem actually to know something about the show may at least partly explain that. When they label the latter Trek series as postmodern, they explain what they mean by modern and postmodern, and why The Next Generation epitomizes the former and Deep Space Nine and Voyager the latter. Although Deep Space Nine seems profoundly and obviously different from The Next Generation while Voyager often feels like a retread of The Next Generation in many ways, the Barretts find a number of areas (including a greater openness toward religion) that the post-Next Generation series share.

Of particular interest to Trek book fans: the Barretts mention some of the Star Trek novels. Diane Carey's nautical obsession is mentioned in the book's "The Starry Sea" chapter, and Peter David's New Frontier character, Burgoyne 172, is mentioned in a discussion of sexual identity and orientation. Star Trek novels are generally overlooked in examinations of the Star Trek phenomenon, which makes these references a welcome change of pace.

On book collecting: does RPG stuff count?

2009-09-29T19:42:00.007-04:00

One of the problems with collecting Star Trek books (not to mention doing a website about Star Trek books) is defining what counts as a Star Trek book. Everyone draws a line between Star Trek books and not-Star Trek books, but not necessarily in the same place. Do you include only licenced materials? Do you include only the printed word, or do comics and graphic novels count? Do you include any fan-produced materials? Do you include everything that's bound in a paper or cloth cover that's entirely or primarily devoted to Star Trek? Do you include stuff that other people would consider booklets or pamphlets?

Do you include role playing game materials?

On the website, I've included the Last Unicorn Games and Decipher Star Trek RPG books because they're very obviously books, some hardcover, some paperback. The content may be a little different but the format is familiar. The original role playing game, though, the 1980s game from FASA, has been somewhat ghettoized, given a page of its own instead of being included in the main part of the site.

The thing is, the FASA RPG materials are often not quite booklike enough. Most of them are stapled, not bound; they're booklets, really. And they often come packaged with other material. Many of the supplements were sold in plastic wrapped packages of two books or booklets, or a booklet and a map, or... and given that they were meant to be sold together, do you consider The Orions: Book of Common Knowledge and The Orions: Book of Deep Knowledge one item or two?

So, all that adds up to why I didn't incorporate the FASA stuff as part of the main site. The thing is, I can't ignore it. There's way too much fun and interesting stuff in those FASA publications. I started buying them in 1986 or '87, even though I'd never played a pen and paper role playing game (still haven't, actually). I think I saw the Federation Sourcebook and picked it up for the hell of it and thought damn, this is actually pretty cool. Sure, some of it's game-specific, but basically it's a fun reference book that makes up a lot of interesting stuff about the Federation that's never been dealt with onscreen. There's other neat reference publications, too, filling in the backstory of the Romulan and Klingon wars, explaining why some types of Klingons look different from others, exploring everything from the culture of the Orions and other civilizations to the role of Starfleet Intelligence, and generally boldly going where canon in that pre-TNG age had rarely gone before. Hell, John M. (The Final Reflection) Ford wrote some of the Klingon material.

Then I picked up some of the adventure modules. Granted, they're for people running RPG campaigns, not for people who want to read a short story or novel, but they're still Star Trek fiction of a sort. It's just that that it comes as a series of infodumps on the situation, setting, characters, and so on. Some of them were pretty interesting, and the art was often very good.

And then came The Next Generation, and in another year or two, FASA was no longer in the Trek RPG business. I remember hearing rumours that the, um, highly speculative material in the TNG Officer's Manual annoyed the Star Trek office, and that the White Flame starship combat module was seen as inconsistent with Roddenberry's new unmilitary vision of Starfleet, but who knows.

But FASA's vision of Star Trek is worth remembering, so I'm punching up the FASA page. More covers are up, and eventually more information.

If you're still here, it may be because you're waiting to ask, okay, Steve, what about Star Fleet Battles?

FASA isn't always booklike enough to be easy to cover on a book site. But Star Fleet Battles is something else entirely, which is why it's so underrepresented on the site. You can buy something like New Worlds II, which looks like a trade paperback in plastic wrap, but what's inside the plastic wrap is not a book. Instead, there's a cover, a 64-page, stapled, hole-punched booklet called Captain's Module C2 - New Worlds II, a 48-page, stapled, hole-punchless booklet called Captain's Module C2 SSD Book New Worlds II, and a card with a bunch of punch-out ship markers. Not a book.

Most SFB material is unbooklike. It's also occasionally revised, replaced, and sometimes apparently abandoned. And then there's the related stuff: Federation and Empire, Prime Directive, Federation Commander. I've been meaning to do something about SFB on the site for years, but aside from a few obvious books, I have no idea how to handle it. There's too damn much. But there will be something. Eventually.

Things you didn't know about Star Trek: The Next Generation

2009-09-29T19:05:00.002-04:00

Some samples of the forgotten knowledge buried within the Star Trek: The Next Generation Officer's Manual:

Excerpts from Academy Slang

KOBO (NOUN)
An individual who is undergoing an examination or test without being aware of the nature of the problem. The term is derived from the "Kobayashi Maru."
MISTHEAD (NOUN)
A person with no real conception of reality; an Academy midshipman
RIDGE OUT (VERB)
To be consumed by a violent rage and to lose all emotional control. The term refers to the cranial ridge of Imperial Klingons and to the traditional Klingon tendency toward violent temperament.
TANTY (ADJ.)
Emotionally disturbed or insane. The word is a corruption of the name Tantalus.
TRIBBLE (NOUN)
Anyone with a weight problem

Excerpt from The Enterprise Legacy

The Enterprise[-B]'s career ended in a fashion befitting its name and class. On Stardate 2/9208.12, the USS Enterprise engaged an IKS L-24 battleship and a Romulan Nova class battleship, which were working together in the Triangle, five parsecs from the Imperial Klingon States. Though the Romulan and Klingon vessels were defeated, it was a pyrrhic victory, for the USS Enterprise also fell. Fearful of losing any more of its already scarce ships-of-the-line, the IKS pulled back its fleet and cut back its Neutral Zone raids almost to nothing.

Excerpt from Friends and Foes

Imperial Klingon States

Not all the inhabitants of worlds formerly part of the Imperial Klingon Empire have gracefully abandoned their predatory ways. More than one member of the Klingon Imperial Navy has sought the refuge of deep space rather than submit to the common good of peace. Indeed, there are thousands of Klingon "refugees" living in the Imperial Klingon States, located in the Triangle Zone between the borders of the Alliance and the Romulan Star Empire. These dissidents gather in small groups to plot continued violence against the hated Federation and their so-called "traitorous" brethren who have joined the Grand Alliance. From their earliest days, the "neutral" Imperial Klingon States were a haven for disillusioned or frustrated glory-seekers from the old Empire. Recent migrations of ex-Imperial Klingons have brought the Imperial Klingon States much-needed manpower and combat-capable vessels, as well as the disturbingly deluded vision of the Klingons' supreme right of conquest and the necessity of war as the natural order of things.

Excerpt from Biographies

Noonian Soong had classically Oriental features and physical build. At the time of his work on the android project, he was a balding man whose beautiful gray eyes were hidden behind thick, heavy-rimmed spectacles.

Hollow Men

2009-09-25T08:20:00.004-04:00

Spoilers ahead (for a book from four years ago).

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

I've been eagerly waiting to read this book since it was first announced, and I've had it in the house for four years. So why am I just getting around to it now? Because I wanted to see it in context. I've got all the DS9 DVDs and had started working through them years ago but stalled at some point. Earlier this year I picked up where I left off, and now that I'm near the end of the sixth season, the time finally came to read this. (Yes, I saw the episodes as they aired, but that was a long time ago.) And it was worth the wait. It's a damn good book.

So, a recap. At the time this book begins, the Dominion War has begun, DS9 has been taken by the Dominion and Cardassia and retaken by the Federation, Sisko and Garak have managed to get the Romulans involved in the war using tactics Sisko feels uncomfortable with, Worf and Dax have married, Odo is still in love with Kira but has only recently reconciled with her over his actions with the Founder during DS9's occupation, and Bashir has been abducted and interrogated by Section 31.

Hollow Men, for the most part, follows up on the events of "In the Pale Moonlight." In that episode, desperate to get the Romulans into the war on the Federation's side, Sisko, with Garak's assistance, comes up with a plan to con them by providing false evidence that the Dominion intends to attack the Romulans. It doesn't work as planned, and it's the murders committed by Garak that actually end up achieving the desired goal. At the end of the episode, Sisko says to himself that as awful as that is, he thinks he can live with it. As far as the TV series is concerned, he does. But the book shows that it's not that easy. Sisko wants someone to know what he's done and wants some kind of punishment. Garak is becoming aware of that and is concerned, not least because the two are going off to Earth for a major conference that will involve the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans.

Meanwhile, some of the others at DS9 are noticing that Bashir is not his usual self. After the Section 31 incident, he's lost interest in the romanticized espionage of his holosuite games. And so the b-story begins, as a freighter brings a load of latinum to the station that, everyone is convinced, someone will try to steal, and Dax suggests Odo get Bashir to act as an investigator, to take his mind off things.

Hollow Men is, then, both a suspenseful espionage story and a puzzling caper story, but it's driven as much by character as by plot. Sisko and Garak in particular get a great deal of attention, and McCormack captures their voices perfectly. Occasionally, in a story written by a British author, dialogue may have moments phrased in a way that sound normal to a British listener but not quite right to a North American, and that never happens here. I could really hear Brooks and Robinson's voices doing the dialogue, and, just as importantly, I could always believe their characters would behave as they do here.

It's an interesting reminder of just how much of an ensemble show DS9 is that we don't often think of Garak from Sisko's perspective. We're more accustomed to Bashir's somewhat more positive view of him, and it can be a surprise to be reminded just how little Sisko likes or trusts Garak, even as he puts himself into a position where he has to trust him, because there's no alternative. (Trust, between people, between cultures, is a key theme of the book.) Garak, of course, has his own concerns about Sisko; he can't manipulate him the way he can manipulate some other characters. The irony is that they're both afraid of what might happen if Sisko's conscience gets the better of him and he tells Starfleet what they did, but the reaction is not what either expects. Starfleet is happy with the results and happy to keep things quiet, and Garak is seen as a more valuable asset.

The book gets steadily more suspenseful as it goes on. An old friend of Sisko's is now a leader of a peace movement, but there's something very odd about it all. Meanwhile, Starfleet Intelligence wants Garak to assassinate Roeder, Sisko's old friend. And on DS9, despite Odo's best efforts, someone is about to pull off a major heist. Because the story is so suspenseful and the prose so well written, I raced through the book, not stopping enough to think about what was going on, so the revelation of how the two storylines converge came as a surprise. It probably wasn't for a lot of people; there are enough clues. After all, the b-story's initial focus on Bashir suggests a follow-up to Inquisition, and the a-story is about the ugliness of espionage -- something Bashir's just learned about. it shouldn't be too much of a leap to expect Section 31 to get involved.

One last point... McCormack's written Blake's 7 fanfic in the past and she mentions "the works of Chris Boucher" among others as an inspiration in her acknowledgments. Boucher wrote a lot of Blake's 7, and now I want to read a full length B7 novel by McCormack. Given what she does here with Sisko and Garak, I'd love to see what she does with Blake and Avon, who have trust issues of their own. (And am I the only person who read the Ariadne scenes as looking like something out of B7? Well, probably.)

I started with a quote from Eliot's "Hollow Men," and before I wind this up I'll quote a bit of McCormack, from near the end of the book, that shows in a few lines McCormack's skill with character and dialogue.

    Odo eased himself into the seat next to Garak. "I forgot to ask," he said, "how was Earth?" At the far end of the bar, Quark put the stopper in the bottle of Saurian brandy he had been watering and came over eagerly to listen.
    Garak put down his glass, opened his mouth to speak, stopped, thought for a while, considered replying, and then thought for a little while longer.
    "I was punched repeatedly by pacifists," he said at last.
    "So," said Quark, picking up a cloth and wiping the bar. "Much as you expected, then?"

McCormack should be on any editor's shortlist of DS9 novelists. She's done a relaunch novel, The Lotus Flower, that (among many other things) did more to make Keiko O'Brien a real and believable character than the TV series managed to do; Hollow Men, a novel set during the series and featuring the regulars; and a very different kind of DS9 novel, The Never-Ending Sacrifice, that spans most of the time covered by the TV series but shows its events from a very different perspective. Wherever the DS9 line goes next, I hope McCormack is part of it.

Fascinating...

2009-09-19T16:30:00.002-04:00

The Complete Starfleet Library is cited as a source in the German book Faszinierend!Star Trek und die Wissenschaften Band 2, or, in English, Fascinating! Star Trek and the Sciences Volume 2.

I'm glad I don't read German, in a way, because there are so many Star Trek nonfiction books published in German that I might otherwise feel the need to buy. Buying books from amazon.de is easy enough, but the shipping costs are a bit much (yes, I've actually looked into this). But still, I'm intrigued by books like Star Trek in Deutschland: Wie Captain Kirk nach Deutschland kam, Jenseits der Sterne: Gemeinschaft und Identität in Fankulturen. Zur Konstitution des Star Trek-Fandoms, and especially Science and a Sense of Hope - Zum Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Religion in der Fernsehserie Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. (Drifting a little, there's also those six Space: 1999 novels only published in German, two of which I own but can't yet read. Maybe someday.)

It's disappointing to go from Amazon.de, with its large number of translated novels and comics and original German nonfiction, to Amazon.fr, which has very little Trek material in French. Few novels have been translated in recent years, and original nonfiction about Trek in French seems to be all but nonexistent -- a shame, because I'd be able to read it with a pretty good degree of comprehension. Searching for Patrouille du Cosmos, the title under which I sometimes saw it at my grandparents' in Quebec, didn't help. Turns out that was the Quebec title; according to French wikipedia, France didn't get Star Trek until 1982 and kept the English title.

Anyway, here's the cite (from Google Books):

Yes, I am geeky enough to think it's cool that my site's been cited in a book.

Nicholas Meyer's View From the Bridge

2009-09-19T15:30:00.002-04:00

Nicholas Meyer's new book is a relatively short and breezy memoir that will probably have a few people wishing for more in-depth material. It could use a fact-check, too -- Meyer acknowledges this, sort of, by stating in the author's note that it's based on his memory, and then referring to the film Rashomon, a movie about the ways people remember a certain event. He gets the number of original series episodes wrong, and he says the Klingons in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country had pink blood because he wanted some interesting weird colour, though as I recall other sources have said the Klingon blood was pink because red blood would have resulted in an R rating for the movie.

There's not much new revealed about the making of the movies, other than the fallings out between various people behind the scenes, and discussions of who actually wrote what, and why the WGA put certain people's names in the credits for certain movies.

If anything, the non-Trek material may be more interesting, because I basically knew Meyer as the guy who did a couple of Sherlock Holmes books (he talks about those a bit, but never mentions the third one) and a few Trek movies. I'd forgotten about his involvement with The Day After, and the chapter on that is fascinating reading.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's an absolutely essential book for Trek fans, but it was well enough written and didn't overstay its welcome. Meyer's authorial voice is engaging and entertaining. Anyone who's read the book but wants a bit more on the nuts and bolts of making the Trek movies Meyer discusses may want to hunt down copies of Allan Asherman's The Making of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, published by Pocket in 1982, and Charting The Undiscovered Country: The Making of Trek VI by Mark Altman, Ron Magid, and Edward Gross, published by Cinemaker in 1992, as well as past issues of magazines like Cinefex and Cinefantastique.

Shatnerquake

2009-09-19T15:29:00.000-04:00

I read Shatnerquake by Jeff Burk a while back. Here's what the publisher's website has to say about it, in case you haven't heard about this book yet:

William Shatner? William Shatner. William Shatner!

It’s Shatner VS Shatners!

It’s the first ShatnerCon with William Shatner as the guest of honor! But after a failed terrorist attack by Campbellians, a crazy terrorist cult that worships Bruce Campbell, all of the characters ever played by William Shatner are suddenly sucked into our world. Their mission: hunt down and destroy the real William Shatner.

Featuring: Captain Kirk, TJ Hooker, Denny Crane, Rescue 911 Shatner, Singer Shatner, Shakespearean Shatner, Twilight Zone Shatner, Cartoon Kirk, Esperanto Shatner, Priceline Shatner, SNL Shatner, and – of course – William Shatner!

No costumed con-goer will be spared in their wave of destruction, no redshirt will make it out alive, and not even the Klingons will be able to stand up to a deranged Captain Kirk with a lightsaber. But these Shatner-clones are about to learn a hard lesson…that the real William Shatner doesn’t take crap from anybody. Not even himself.

It’s Shatnertastic!

It's a thin trade paperback, only 83 pages. And it's very silly, as one would expect of a story in which Shatner finds himself surrounded by the characters he played on TV and in movies due to a fiction bomb gone haywire at a Shatnercon. For the most part it's a goofy runaround with a lot of violence, neither as satirical or surreal as it might like to be. The scene with the two-dimensional animated Kirk was good, almost poignant, though.

Dunno if there's enough Trek-related content to make it worth adding to the website. It's more about the current oddball pop culture icon Shatner of Denny Crane, Priceline, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds on youtube, etc than it is about Kirk.

Oh, and the list of other books by the author includes Shatnerquest and Shatnerpocalypse. If Burk is really thinking of writing those, I can only say, brevity is the soul of wit. 83 pages is brief enough.

Stargazer at last

2009-09-19T14:22:00.003-04:00

As I've said here before, I have been behind in some of my Trek fiction reading. So now I'm reading Michael Jan Friedman's Stargazer series. I read the books that laid the groundwork for the series, Reunion and Valiant, as they were published, so I've started with the first book published under the Stargazer banner, Gauntlet. As I write this I've just started the fourth book in the series, Oblivion, but it's not too early to write some comments on the series.

Friedman introduced the crew of the Stargazer, Jean-Luc Picard's first command, in the Next Generation novel Reunion. The Stargazer series begins shortly after a young Picard has been given command of the Stargazer. The books are resolutely old-fashioned. Each novel is a standalone, though there are a few ongoing arcs from book to book. The prose is solid and unpretentious, the types of stories being told the kind that could be adapted to any of the Trek book series. They've generally got good, basic SF stories -- space pirates, space anomalies, and so on -- and there's a lot of focus on the original characters in Picard's crew. The execution isn't always what it could be -- in Gauntlet, there are some brief scenes involving the space pirate that read like something out of a pulp circa 1940, complete with "they'll never take us alive, mwahahaha" dialogue, and the truth behind the pirate's activities and motivations doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. I'm also of the opinion that the crazy Starfleet Admiral is a story element that should have been retired a long, long time ago.

But by and large this is straightforward Trek; I've read a lot of TOS and TNG novels that feel pretty similar to these books. That may be why the series hasn't had a new entry in five years. If there's a book series loosely comparable to Stargazer (a single author, books-only series) it's Peter David's New Frontier. I may not always enjoy it, but New Frontier is undoubtedly idisoyncratic; you won't get that same experience elsewhere. Stargazer doesn't stand out in the same way. And compared to newer series like Vanguard, it feels very dated and old-fashioned. If it hasn't generated the kind of following that New Frontier has, that's not too surprising.

If there's another problem with Stargazer, it's that it's set so early in Picard's command. The one other Stargazer officer fans tend to know about is Jack Crusher, and these books are set years before he shows up. We know how important Crusher's friendship was to Picard -- it's one of the few things we know about the Stargazer years -- and it seems like the sort of thing that might be expected to be explored in a series like this. But it isn't.

I'm liking the books well enough. They aren't bad, though they're sometimes a bit simplistic. The prose is unobjectionable. It's just that they feel like the product of another era -- the Ordoverian era, perhaps. I probably would have enjoyed them just fine fifteen years or so ago. After the DS9 relaunch, Vanguard, Titan, Destiny, and so on, they just don't excite me.

Hoping for a happy ending

2009-09-19T12:17:00.004-04:00

Looks like there's been a bit of confusion at Pocket following the layoff of editor Margaret Clark, a few months after the layoff of editor Marco Palmieri. David McIntee was told his proposal for an Abramsverse novel focusing on Scotty, which he'd worked on with Margaret, had been sent off to John Van Citters at CBS licensing for approval. And then Margaret lost her job. And David didn't hear anything, until Greg Cox announced on TrekBBS that he's doing the book David thought he was doing.

This sort of thing should usually be happening quietly out of view of the fans; we're generally told it isn't any of our business. But we're used to hearing regularly from Trek editors. John Ordover and Marco were both regulars on the Trek boards; Margaret didn't appear nearly as often, but she still posted occasionally. All we know now is that Pocket still has a couple of editors on staff who've done some Trek books. We haven't heard from them, we haven't heard how responsibilities for the books will shake out, and we haven't heard whether there may be any changes to the lineup of books Margaret announced for the rest of 2009 and 2010; there were, after all, some changes when Marco was laid off.

But now we're seeing at least one writer getting lost in the shuffle. Someone at Pocket has evidently dropped the ball. (ETA: it's been suggested that the ball was dropped before the shuffle; if the editors still there didn't know about this, they're free of any blame, and, more importantly, that things may improve.) I just hope there's a way to resolve this to everyone's satisfaction.

Footnote: in that Unreality SF roundtable on Pocket Books and Star Trek XI, Jens Deffner asked the participants who we'd like to see writing in the Abrams timeline novels. Part of my response: "I'd be curious to see what someone like David McIntee, who's done some action-oriented Doctor Who novels, could do with this more action-oriented Star Trek." I'm still curious.

Where's our Nick Hornby?

2009-09-09T08:44:00.006-04:00

I've asked it before, I'm sure. But I wonder when someone is going to write the book on being a Star Trek fan, the way Nick Hornby wrote the book on being a soccer/football fan (Fever Pitch) and the book on being a music fan (High Fidelity). Sure, we have the movie Free Enterprise, and a very good movie it is, too, but why not a book? A memoir or a novel? Okay, there's Warp, by Lev Grossman, but it's more a novel about an overeducated Harvard grad who doesn't know what to do with his life, as written by same, than it is a novel about being a Star Trek fan.

Doctor Who fans have memoirs like Dalek I Loved You by Nick Griffiths (a bit disappointing, I thought, but still), and soon they'll have something that has the promise of being both fun and special: The Diary of a "Dr Who" Addict by Paul Magrs. Magrs is not only a respected novelist in his own right, he's the author of several Doctor Who novels and audios, including the new BBC audio series starring Tom Baker, and the creator of spinoff character Iris Wildthyme.

Here's the publisher's description of the book:

It's the 1980's and David has just started secondary school. He's becoming a teenager, but still hanging onto the rituals of childhood, particularly his addiction to Doctor Who, sharing the books with his best friend and neighbour, Robert, and watching the TV show. But time moves relentlessly on, and Robert starts rejecting the Doctor in favour of girls, free weights and new music. Against a backdrop of Bowie, Breville toasters and trips to Blackpool, David acknowledges his own abilities and finds his place in the world.

It's aimed at younger readers, obviously, but I'll be getting it, and I expect a lot of adult Who fans, especially in the UK, will as well. So why not try something like this for Star Trek fans? There hasn't been any YA-oriented Star Trek in years; maybe something kind of like this would be worth a shot.

The Never-Ending Sacrifice

2009-08-31T10:11:00.004-04:00

GARAK I can't believe I'm eating lunch with a man who thinks The Never-Ending Sacrifice is dull.

BASHIR I just thought it got a little redundant after a while. I mean... the author is supposed to be chronicling seven generations of a single family... but he tells the same story over and over again... All the characters live lives of selfless duty to the state... get old... and die. And then the next generation comes along and does it all over again.

GARAK That's the whole point, Doctor. The repetitive epic is the most elegant form of Cardassian literature, and The Never-Ending Sacrifice is its greatest achievement.

BASHIR But the characters never really come alive. I mean, there's more to life than serving the state.

GARAK A Federation viewpoint if ever I heard one.

Fortunately, Julian Bashir is not describing this book. Una McCormack's The Never-Ending Sacrifice is a great DS9 novel.

There's two ways to explore a society in a novel: from an insider's perspective, or from an outsider's perspective. In Andrew J. Robinson's A Stitch in Time, we see Cardassia from the perspective of insider (if occasional exile) Elim Garak. Here, we see Cardassia from a very different perspective, that of Rugal, a young man born and raised on Bajor until his Cardassian father discovers he's still alive and risks his career and his position in Cardassian society to bring his son home (as seen in the episode "Cardassians"). Not that Rugal appreciates that at all; he sees himself as more Bajoran than Cardassian, and he distances himself from his newfound family and homeworld.

Basically, Una McCormack's Never-Ending Sacrifice is a classic coming of age novel. Rugal finds himself in a very different place from the one in which he grew up, he has a lot to learn about culture and politics, and he goes through a lot of changes before he finds his place in the world. It's a common story type, used often in mainstream fiction. It's also often used in science fiction, because the coming of age in a strange land story allows a lot of opportunity for worldbuilding. We learn about the character's world as he or she does, so exposition is built into the structure.

Rugal's story spans several years, from the second season of DS9 to the time of the relaunch novels. On Cardassia, he rejects the status that could be his as the son of an important man and leads us through parts of Cardassian society we never saw onscreen. Even though we know in broad strokes what happens to Cardassia -- Klingon invasion, the military and Obsidian order loss of power folowing their failed attack on the Founders, the brief rule of the Detapa Council, Dukat's deal with the Dominion, the war, Damar's resistance, the devastation of Cardassia -- Rugal allows us to see all of it from a different perspective, and a growing, maturing perspective at that.

A coming of age story needs a believable and believably maturing protagonist, and McCormack fleshes Rugal out, from (understandably) petulant teenager to thoughtful young man. Unlike the characters Bashir describes, the characters in this book do come alive. The supporting cast, some new to the book (e.g., Penelya), some from episodes on TV (Kotan Pa'dar, Gul Dukat, Alon Ghemor, Tora Ziyal, and more), are also well drawn. Through his exploration of Cardassian society, from the ranks of the political elite to the garrets of revolutionary students to the slums of the underclass, Rugal experiences Cardassia and grows accordingly. Sometimes he's able to make his own way, at other times, he's at the mercy of the plots and schemes that pervade Cardassia. By the end of the book he's able to find his own direction, one that might have surprised his younger self.

McCormack's Never-Ending Sacrifice is not much like the Cardassian repetitive epic of the same name (a book Rugal doesn't care for), but it does seem like a tale of never-ending sacrifice. Rugal loses his Bajoran adoptive parents and much more, and his parents, both adoptive and Cardassian, have plenty of sacrifices to make as well. Duty to the state is on everyone's mind -- not always by choice, but because the state expects it. Rugal's father Kodan finds his ways of serving the state, while Rugal balances service to the state with rejection of it.

As a story, it's an intelligent and emotionally affecting work, with political suspense, romance, action, tragedy, and occasionally a little humour. It's proof, as if any more were needed, that a damn good Star Trek novel can be told about a character who appeared in only one episode. You don't have to be a DS9 fan to like it, though you'll get more out of it if you are. Whether you like stories with an epic sweep or intimate character studies, there's something here for you.

The poetry of Leonard Nimoy

2009-08-28T08:07:00.002-04:00

Let's hope this strikes the right balance between fair use of copyrighted material and the curiosity of fandom. I believe Leonard Nimoy's books of poetry are out of print, but used copies can be found fairly easily. These are the two I have: We Are All Children Searching for Love (Blue Mountain Press, 1977) and Come Be With Me (Blue Mountain Press, 1978).

I am convinced

I am convinced
That if all mankind
Could only gather together
In one circle
Arms on each other's shoulders
And dance, laugh and cry
     together
   Then much
     of the tension and burden
       of life
     Would fall away
In the knowledge that
We are all children
Needing and wanting
Each other's
Comfort and
Understanding
We are all children
Searching for love

You stepped deep into the waters

You stepped
Deep into
  The waters
   Of my soul

Patiently you searched
For the precious
     Stone

You found it
Warmed it
  Caressed it
And gave it
  To me
Unselfishly
  As a gift

And now
  It is ours
    And we call it
        Love

I may not be

I may not be the fastest
I may not be the tallest
     Or the strongest

I may not be the best
Or the brightest

    But one thing I can do better
     Than anyone else...

      That is

        To be me

If love can be

If love can be withdrawn
It never was

My love for you is not a gift
    To you
     It is a gift
        To me

Without others

Without others
   I am
      Alone

Without you
   I am
      Lonesome

Unreality SF on the new Star Trek movie and Star Trek books

2009-08-15T13:20:00.002-04:00

Unreality SF, the website specializing in coverage of SF media tie-ins, just published Jens Deffner's article Trek XI: Did the books miss the bandwagon?. Deffner poses a number of questions about the shortage of tie-in books for the new movie at present and Pocket's plans for the future, getting opinions from published Trek writers/longtime fans Keith R.A. DeCandido, Geoffrey Thorne and Allyn Gibson and from one unpublished blogging fan, me. As pleasantly surprised as I was to be asked to participate, I expected there'd be just bits and pieces from me and a lot of other people, so it was a bit of a surprise to see how much I'm quoted. So I won't repeat myself here.

There's an Unreality facebook group now, too. Unreality is building up a considerable mass of interesting interviews and reviews. If you're reading this you probably already know about it, but if not, check it out.

Music of the Spheres

2009-08-10T10:50:00.003-04:00

Another one I downloaded years ago and only just read. Margaret Wander Bonanno's Music of the Spheres (email her for a copy) has become almost legendary among Star Trek books fans. She wrote the book during the Richard Arnold era, and her "Probed" article about the writing of the book blames Arnold and then-editor Dave Stern (I believe; she refers to him as RockStar and Arnold as Trelane) for what happened. The proposal was approved, she wrote the novel, and then everything went haywire. She was pulled from her own book and replaced by J.M. Dillard, who did the rewriting on the published version of Brad Ferguson's A Flag Full of Stars, and then Dillard herself was replaced by Gene DeWeese. Bonanno calculates 7% of her book is in the finished product.

So, that's the backstory. The story itself is a double sequel, following up on the Probe from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and characters from Bonanno's 1985 Trek novel Dwellers in the Crucible. The Enterprise is invoted to participate in an archeological dig as part of a diplomatic effort by the new Romulan leader; meanwhile, the Probe is returning to its homeworld. Naturally, the storylines intersect.

I can see why some people really like Music of the Spheres. Bonanno has a strong and distinctive voice, and really uses it, writing in a poetic prose style for the scenes from the perspective of the Probe and its creators, writing formal, almost archaic prose for the Romulan characters, and writing casual, slangy prose for the Enterprise regulars and human guest stars. The book has a strong focus on relationships, real, potential, and fading, as well as on music, which turns out to be the language of the Probe. Good thing that diplomatic mission just happened to involve some prominent musicians as well as archeologists, given that it's the musicians and archeologists who do the most to solve the mystery of the Probe.

Which leads me to my point: I didn't really like this book very much. I found it self-indulgent, as though Bonanno mainly wanted to write about the characters she created and about music, while it was apparently the editor's suggestion to write about the Probe. I didn't care for her prose stylings, either, Repeatedly referring to the Probe with the phrase "Messenger, Wanderer, Gatherer -- more prosaically: Probe" was just one of the annoyances. The narration sometimes has odd flights of fancy; sure, it's from characters' POV, but little interjections like "Eerie!" just come off feeling a little odd.

The dialogue didn't work for me, either; when she wrote for familiar characters, the dialogue rarely rang true. Likewise for some less familiar characters -- a (male) Starfleet Admiral calling Kirk "Jim baby"? Also, for a book with a lot of guest characters (Cleante, T'Shael, Jandra, Dajan, Rihan, Lord Harbinger (sounds like a video game villain), Tiam, Kittay, Ryan, Anneke, Harper, etc), few get much development or distinctive voices. It might have worked better if the book focused more on a smaller cast.

Ironically, for a book with a huge guest cast and major supporting roles for certain TV supporting cast (Uhura and Sulu, the latter in an unconvincing role as a part-time secret agent), this is possibly the only Trek novel written by a pro in which characters consciously think about Kirk, Spock, and McCoy the way some people do in real life: as the "legendary triumvirate", Spock as superego and guardian angel, McCoy as id and devil's advocate, Kirk at the centre. That's a bit too meta for me. Kirk should be aware of his friends' roles in his decision-making, certainly, but he shouldn't necessarily think about it in the same terms as people writing about him as a fictional character.

Then there's the attempts to pay tribute to Diane Duane's work with the Romulans by sneaking things in with the subtlety of a flying mallet -- Captain Rihan of the ship Hannsu. If it was already known that Paramount (i.e., Arnold) had issues with Duane's Rihannsu, why expect something so unsubtle to get through? If it wasn't yet known that they were problematic, why not just call the Romulans Rihannsu and give them names in line with Duane's Romulan character names?

At any rate, it's not hard to see why an editor and Paramount Licensing might have issues, even if the latter took the form of the notorious Arnold, who reportedly blocked a Trek comics plot involving time travel on the grounds that time travel was too complicated for Star Trek fans. The book is in love with its multitude of guest stars; the "legendary triumvirate" doesn't actually have much to do; there's not a lot of plot; the musical solution involves a lot of handwaving (possibly even literally once Anneke the dancer gets involved).

This time around I haven't skimmed through the published version, because it appears that the changes are much more significant and extensive than was the case with A Flag Full of Stars. I don't remember much about Probe, having read it back in 1992; that usually means I found it neither terribly good nor terribly bad, because I tend to remember the extremes.

So... I didn't care for this one, but as I said above I can see why others might; it's a singular, idiosyncratic work, anything but generic. I've liked Bonanno's other books considerably more than I liked this, and I'm looking forward to her next one with no little anticipation (there should be a lot more Saavik novels than there are, dammit!).

The Soul Key

2009-07-31T20:49:00.004-04:00

There may be spoilers ahead.

It's a shame when I'm less excited about a book than I should be for reasons that have little to do with the book, but that's the case here. The DS9 relaunch line, for my money one of the best SF media tie-in series ever, hit a few stumbling blocks over the last few years, the most significant being the Fearful Symmetry situation. Leanna Morrow was hired to write it, but for some reason was dropped from the project, and Olivia Woods was brought in to write the book, apparently starting from scratch. Meanwhile, Pocket halved the number of Star Trek mass market paperbacks it published, meaning more competition for each slot on the schedule. All of which means that DS9 relaunch books have been relatively few and far between compared to the early days of the series.

As to why the delays are a significant problem... the books are serialized, with many storylines carrying over from one book to the next. The novel Rising Son set a few pieces in place for a big new storyline that hasn't really started yet, and that book was published in 2003.

So it's a mixed blessing that The Soul Key essentially follows on from Fearful Symmetry in following just one storyline, the Mirror Universe storyline started a few years back. The good: that storyline has now been resolved. The not so good: aside from a couple of pages at the end suggesting the series may finally be ready to deal with the Ascendants storyline started in Rising Son, the Mirror Universe storyline is all this novel is about. Not to mention that a series that used to be character-driven has had a couple of books that focus almost entirely on one new character and on moving the plot forward. Kira and Vaughn get moments, but the villain, Iliana Ghemor, gets the lion's share of character work.

But again, all those complaints come from looking at the series as a whole rather than this one book. And I raced through this one. It may not be the kind of story I wish we were getting, and it's short compared to many other recent Trek novels, but on its own, it's fine. And those last few pages... well. Damn. I just hope that storyline has a chance to play out, because after next month's Cardassia-centric The Never-Ending Sacrifice, we have a long wait for the next DS9 novel, and it's set several years in the series' future and is part of the Typhon Expanse crossover story arc.

Not much of a review, really, is it? But it's like reviewing a chapter instead of a full novel. Most of what I think about to say has more to do with the publishing problems than the book in its own right. Would it matter that the book gets off to a slow start, spending a lot of time on what Iliana was up to in the buildup to her first appearance a couple books back, if the last four novels had appeared in the space of a single year? Same goes for the fact that this book and Fearful Symmetry both spend an awful lot of time filling in Iliana's backstory. In a different publishing schedule, that's not a bug, it's a feature. I'm also nearing my saturation point as far as the Mirror Universe as concerned -- and there again, that's talking about the Trek line in general rather than this novel.

Anyway, everyone who reads the DS9 relaunch is going to need to read this; anyone who doesn't really shouldn't be starting with it. A few years from now, someone will read all the books in this series one after the other in a short period of time, without the publication delays being a factor, and that person will probably be able to come up with a more useful critique of the novel. Until then, well, it was generally well written, if not as balanced as I might like, and I wouldn't mind seeing what Woods can do in other corners of the Star Trek playground.

A Flag Full of Stars

2009-07-29T10:50:00.003-04:00

Spoilers for the published and unpublished versions of the book.

Finally. I finally printed out and read Brad Ferguson's original version of his Star Trek novel A Flag Full of Stars, many many years after I first downloaded it. Ferguson made the original available online because he felt the published version, released with his name on the cover, didn't really represent his work, as it was extensively rewritten by J.M. Dillard after Paramount had some issues with his first draft and his repeated rewrites. (It's a similar situation to Margaret Wander Bonanno's Music of the Spheres/Probe debacle; both happened back in the Richard Arnold era.)

If there's a problem with the original, it's that it isn't about James T. Kirk. He's practically a guest star in his own story. Kevin Riley has more of a story arc in the book than Kirk does. So do the Klingon G'dath and the reporter Nan Davis. What happened to Kirk between the end of the five year mission and the beginning of Star Trek - The Motion Picture is supposed to be what this second Lost Years book is about, but there's not enough of that there. Yes, we see Kirk getting dissatisfied, we see his marriage to Lori Ciana crumble, but the whole story takes place over a few days. The scope is pretty limited. It's also a short novel, despite Ferguson's scenes showcasing his Heinlein-influenced vision of 23rd century Earth in general, and the city of "N'York" in particular.

I read it remembering precious little about the published version, and found it a reasonably enjoyable read, but with some discordant tones here and there. The comic relief character who's an excuse for union bashing, for example. The multiple Heinlein references (a student named Rico has to do homework on mechanized armour; N'Yorkers get around on slidewalks out of "The Roads Must Roll;" an unnamed SF writer is the official founder of the first moon colony despite dying before it was founded because he was so goshdarn great and influential) can get to be a bit much. But there's a lot of nice touches, too, with the book's exploration of a Klingon character who isn't a warrior and is having a hard time coping with humans' distrust and suspicion; the 300th anniversary of the first moon landing and the refitting of a certain old space shuttle as part of the celebrations; a flashback sequence to Kirk and Riley's experience with Kodos the Executioner...

Anyway, I very quickly skimmed through the published version, and it follows the original pretty closely in terms of the basic plot (Klingon scientist living on Earth and teaching schoolchildren invents amazingly powerful energy source while Kirk prepares for the 300th anniversary and oversees the Enterprise refit and Kevin Riley tries to figure out whether to become less of a screwup than he is already). There are some significant differences, though. For one, Kirk and his wife Lori Ciana (as established in Roddenberry's novelization of STTMP) are both presented more sympathetically in the published version, and there's a sign of hope for their relationship at the end of the book. A few scenes told from one character's point of view in one version are told from another's in the other. There's a subplot involving G'dath's students that plays into the drastically revised hostage situation that ends the book. Ferguson's extrapolations about future Earth are largely dropped, as far as I could tell. A tense scene involving Kirk and Starfleet Admiral Timothea Rogers, who's been essentially demoted by Nogura to give Kirk a job, seems to be absent (and along with it the revelation that she was Pike's Number One). The hostage crisis plays out very differently, in part because of the student perspective on the events, but also in terms of who's present, who's killed, who's taken captive, who survives the violent resolution of the situation, and Riley's part in events. G'dath is as important in the revised version as he is in the original, but Nan Davis has a significantly reduced part to play.

A lot of the changes in the book seem to be about making characters like Kirk and Riley more active, more sympathetic, and less passive, and making the ending of the book much more positive.

My very hasty skim through the published version wasn't enough to let me judge whether it's a better-written book. Looking strictly at the original, it's not hard to see why some rewrites were requested. It gives too much of the spotlight to characters who should really just be supporting characters in a trilogy that's supposed to tell us what happened to Kirk, Spock, and McCoy at this time, and its science fictional extrapolations don't always, imho, really fit with the Star Trek universe. The union bashing served no purpose other than to demonstrate fidelity to Heinleinian libertarianism; it certainly wasn't funny, and one suspects that Ferguson thought readers would be happy when that character gets killed. That seems a bit excessive.

The book needed some changes and improvements. The original manuscript is not a lost classic butchered by the intervention of small-minded middlemen. Instead, it's a flawed book that needed to be improved, but the intervention of small-minded middlemen happened anyway. Whether it got the improvements it needed is an exercise for the reader.

Star Trek Omnibus Volume 2: Early Voyages

2009-07-17T13:57:00.004-04:00

IDW gets it right this time. One of the best runs of Star Trek comics is back, and it looks a lot better than the first Omnibus, which had poor reproduction.

Early Voyages was a seventeen issue series featuring Captain Christopher Pike of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Every issue was written by Dan Abnett and Ian Edginton. The art team went through a few changes, with Patrick Zircher, Mike Collins, and Javier Pulio on pencils and Greg Adams and Steve Moncuse on inks, but there's not a single issue with bad art. In short, the book looks great, and it's a damn good read, too. Abnett and Edginton mix single issue stories and continued stories with occasional background arc elements. There are elements of Pike's past and Starfleet's future here, and some of the supporting characters, like Colt, get the spotlight.

The only problem with the book is that the comic was cancelled so abruptly that the last issue came before its continuing story had ended. But that's no reason not to read it. This is one of the best and most consistent runs of any Star Trek comic. If you like Star Trek but you've never read a Star Trek comic, this is a great one to start with.

Losing the Peace

2009-07-17T12:48:00.002-04:00

Spoilers ahead.

William Leisner's first full length novel, the post-Destiny Next Generation novel Losing the Peace, is out now. And it's a good, satisfying read.

I found Leisner's "A Less Perfect Union" one of the highlights of the very good Myriad Universes books, and Losing the Peace has some thematic similarities to that story. "A Less Perfect Union" showed the classic Star Trek values beginning to assert themselves in a timeline much less utopian than the one we're used to. Something similar happens in Losing the Peace. The Borg invasion has caused a lot of destruction and displacement in the Federation, and the strains are beginning to show. Certain member worlds are unhappy about the numbers of displaced survivors they've had to take in; conditions aren't good, and tensions are rising. But by the end of the book there are promising signs that the Federation will once more pull together, thanks to some unconventional tactics from Jean-Luc Picard and his crew.

Losing the Peace has a lot of good character moments. Newer characters T'Ryssa Chen, Jasminder Choudhury, and Miranda Kadohata share the spotlight with Jean-Luc Picard, Beverly Crusher, and Worf, each of them getting good scenes and development. There are good continuity touches with TV Trek and recent novels, as well, with the appearance of Pacifica and its native sentient species, the Selkies, the latter also explored in Christopher Bennett's Over a Torrent Sea by way of the character Aili Lavena, and the use of Arandis, played on Deep Space Nine by Vanessa Williams, as a viewpoint character among the displaced Risans.

The story moves quickly and is always engaging; Leisner's prose is clean and clear, and his ear for dialogue is good. There are some much needed lighter moments in what could have been an overwhelmingly dark book; that balance is appreciated.

Some minor notes: Leisner, a resident of Minnesota, names an alien after the Minnesota town of Bemidji, a place where, coincidentally, I once got drunk. And two quibbles: first, while I appreciate the thematic importance of the scenes with a beautiful and peaceful Mogadishu at the beginning of the book, the idea that Geordi is from there jarred a little at first, because LeVar Burton doesn't look Somali. But it's a few hundred years from now, so there's no reason to assume Geordi's Mogadishu isn't as cosmopolitan and diverse as some other cities in the world are now. Second, shouldn't Starfleet have done something about the restrictive DRM on its software by now, so holodocs can be copied rather than just transferred?

But those quibbles don't change the fact that this is a thoughtful, solidly entertaining novel and a strong novel-length debut for Bill Leisner.

Star Trek newspaper comic strips

2009-07-17T12:36:00.002-04:00

Over at the TrekBBS, user KirkPicard posted a link to a new site by Rich Handley offering scans of all of the Star Trek newspaper comic strips from 1979-83 and British comic strips from various publications. Several years back Pocket considered the possibility of doing a book of the US strips, but cancelled its plans because essential legal paperwork couldn't be located. Rich made available CD ROMs of this material a few years ago. Now it's all online for free.

The UK strips are similar to the early Gold Key comics -- not entirely faithful to the show, to put it mildly. The US strips, on the other hand, definitely have some worthwhile moments. And they're free. Check them out!

(This is an old scan of mine; Rich's are sharper and clearer.)

2010 Pocket schedule

2009-07-11T14:09:00.008-04:00

Okay, let's take a look at the novels in the schedule, as reported by TrekMovie.com:

January
Sorrows of Empire by David Mack

This is something we haven't really had before -- an expansion of a previously published novella. It's an interesting idea, but with the one-a-month schedule, I'm not sure it's a good one. Still... it's David Mack.

February
Inception by S.D. Perry

Kirk and Spock and Carole Marcus and Leila Kalomi, early in their careers. It could be argued that this is fanwank/gap-filling, but not by me. I want to keep getting stories about the original gang, but I don't need more generic five year mission stories.

March
Treason by Peter David (mass market reprint)

Just a new Frontier reprint? Hello? My birthday is in March. Give me something here.

April
The Children of Kings by Dave Stern

A Pike story. Good. Using Pike is a another good way to explore the TOS era without giving us something we've already seen too many times. We only have a few novels and the Marvel Early Voyages comics, so this is welcome.

Oh, and speaking of Pike... what happened to Mike Barr's The Millennium Bloom?

May
Unspoken Truth by Margaret Wander Bonanno

Saavik after Star Trek IV? This is long, long overdue. The most memorable and intriguing new character from the six TOS movies has always been the opportunity people keep missing. Even the movies dropped the ball, not least by miscasting Saavik after Alley moved on. We only have a few novel appearances and some DC comics stories. (Will the book be consistent with what's been established in the handful of other books that deal with Saavik?)

June (possibly July)
Untitled New Frontier by Peter David [trade paperback]

Ho hum.

June
Refugees by Alan Dean Foster

The first novel to be set in the continuity of the new movie. I suspect one of two things will happen with this and the following books: they will be relentlessly generic Star Trek stories that don't really build on much from the movie, or they will be contradicted in several ways by the next movie. I'm mildly curious but keeping my expectations low. As for Foster, as much as I liked the work he did expanding the animated episode stories for the Star Trek Logs, I was never a big fan of his prose style.

July
Seek a Newer World by Christopher Bennett

Okay, this intrigues me. Bennett's first novel was the excellent Ex Machina, which examined the ways the first Star Trek motion picture changed the characters. Seeing what he can do with the new movie's changes on the characters is a nice parallel.

August
More Beautiful than Death by David Mack

David Mack... yeah, this intrigues me too.

September
Untitled 4th New Star Trek Movie era book

Obviously too early to tell.

October
Seize the Fire (TITAN) by Michael Martin

And now we're into the Typhon Pact stuff. I am interested in the idea of a continuing storyline across the series; I just hope there's nothing like the TNG relaunch's editorial problems. And though I liked some of the early Mangels and Martin books like The Sundered, I've been a lot less impressed by some of their more recent work. Martin solo... could be better, could be worse.

November
Zero Sum Game (AVENTINE) by David Mack

This, of course, I am interested in.

December
The Rough Beasts of Empire (DS9) by David R. George III

This too. DRG3 doing DS9, what's not to like? Well, aside from jumping ahead a few years so this can be a Typhon Pact story. Is this an aberration, and later books will return where The Soul Key and Never Ending Sacrifice leave off, or is it a relaunch of the relaunch, potetnially leaving Marco Palmieri's unfinished storylines behind? I'll be peeved if it's the latter.

January 2011
Path of Disharmony (TNG) by Dayton Ward

Dayton Ward. That's good news too. More Typhon Pact business. If we're lucky, though, this will either wrap the Typhon storyline up, or at least be the last book before we get a run of something else for a few months.

So, for the year, we get basically three things: TOS, JJ TOS, and Typhon Pact (plus a New Frontier novel). The Typhon storyline at least allows us some variety by giving us Titan, Aventine, DS9, and TNG. But no Voyager, no Enterprise, no Vanguard. No exciting return of Gorkon/Klingon Empire or Starfleet Corps of Engineers. Which reminds me, no reported mention of ebooks. I'm still not crazy about them as a format, but does the fact that Pocket tried too soon with original ebooks mean that it shouldn't bother now that the Kindle and other readers are really catching on?

Titan art by Geoff Thorne

2009-06-17T07:23:00.003-04:00

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

2009-06-05T10:07:00.002-04:00

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

2009-06-02T11:52:00.006-04:00

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

2009-05-29T17:24:00.004-04:00

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

2009-05-27T10:10:00.002-04:00

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

2009-05-23T21:14:00.002-04:00

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

2009-05-23T20:49:00.002-04:00

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

2009-05-03T22:50:00.004-04:00

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

2009-04-17T09:24:00.003-04:00

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

2009-04-16T08:56:00.003-04:00

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.

Blast from the past: Rising Son

2009-04-12T10:47:00.002-04:00

It's almost become a cliche now for people to say "I love the DS9 relaunch books! I didn't bother reading Rising Son, though." There aren't very many books in the series, and all of them are worth reading. So, here are notes toward a review, as written in December 2002.

Spoilers ahead!

Some thoughts written at about halfway through the book:

The book captures Jake's personality well. He's open, friendly, likeable, thoughtful, but still a bit naive. He's eager for some excitement, but also nicely and properly conflicted about his role on the ship he ends up on, Even Odds (thinking his dad wouldn't approve, although everything Jake participates in can be justified somehow.)

The father issue is one of the key themes. Jake latches on to Dez as a father substitute. He's been motivated in this whole thing by his search for his father, with whom he's been very close (one of the TV show's nice touches, and usually handled much better than Star Trek's other families). But he's not a kid now, he's a young man, and transferring his need for his dad, however, temporarily and shallowly, onto Dez is something I expect to lead to some kind of problem. Having Dez set up as someone with his own father issues (underexplored so far) was a good move because it helps integrate Jake into the crew more quickly and easily, but again is the sort of thing that could lead to some kind of problem between Dez and Jake eventually as each can only fill the other's needs so far. Something missing from the story so far: some kind of potential romantic entanglement for Jake, which is often part of a coming-of-age story. Unless the problem between Dez and Jake is going to end up involving Facity, who is apparently the only shaggable humanoid female present Jake's noticed as such.

This is sort of a Farscapish version of Trek, though that would have had more women and more sexual undertones.

Fanwank: references to New Bajor, Tosk, "The Die is Cast", Vash, Q, the Wadi, the Karemma, etc. it's all justifiable in a couple of ways. The planets and races mentioned are all closer to the wormhole than the Dominion is, so it would make sense to bump into them. DS9 was not supposed to be about the Alpha Quadrant and the Dominion only (I liked the line about it being a year before anyone from the Alpha Quadrant even heard rumors about the Dominion). Also, I like how the continuity-heavy stuff Jake's experiencing contrasts with the mostly new stuff the Defiant encounters in Mission: Gamma.

Lots of decent SF stuff (types of aliens, the Wa, etc).

Some thoughts added a few pages later (after the info on Dez's father, among other things):

Stessie's final moments with Glessin were very touching.

Dez trying to emotionally manipulate Jake for reasons that are questionable but not evil make for good DS9-style character-based storytelling. More so than the other Trek series, DS9 is good at morally ambiguous characters and situations instead of clearly drawn good and evil.

The story changes dramatically when Tosk and Wex appear -- are they about to meet Opaka? How does Wex know humans when she sees them?

I should have recognized Ennis from Sen Ennis the first time it was mentioned in passing, though it was obviously going to have some kind of payoff, as was the village of the poor.

Opaka's story is way overdue -- not in the context of this book, but in the context of the Deep Space Nine as a whole.

Thoughts written after I finished reading the book:

The story is well-structured, with everything seemingly there for a reason (even the Wa ends up tying in with the Eav'oq somehow). Early mentions of Eav-oq, the clues that Tosk will lead them to Eav-oq artifacts, leading to discovery of the Eav'oq... it all starts off just as casual details mentioned in passing and builds nicely. The stuff with Raiq gets an interesting payoff when Opaka later realizes what Raiq's people's belief system is actually about -- and I have no doubt we'll be seeing them again. They have the potential to be a really interesting adversary, with their own weird take on the wormhole aliens as another challenge to the Bajoran belief system (which will by then have already been rocked by the Eav'oq).

A bit of a digression: several years ago, KW Jeter's Bloodletter made the obvious-in-retrospect point, never made by the TV writers, that there should be a station on the other side of the wormhole. This novel makes the idea of a Gamma Quadrant group of wormhole alien religious believers seem equally obvious in retrospect. Some of the Eav'oq spin on the wormhole aliens seems potentially problematic, because everything in the Bajoran faith can easily be viewed as consistent with the portrayal of the aliens as beings who don't experience time as we do and who therefore could impart knowledge of the future to Bajorans of the past, who then see and play it out as prophecy. The notion of reincarnation of spirit seems more like a conventional (i.e. Earthly) religious belief and doesn't work as well with the traditional matter-of-perspective way the Bajoran religion has been presented. (That is, the Starfleet types and the Bajoran types can see the same things happening while disagreeing on what they mean. This won't be the case with either the Bajorans or the Starfleet types and the Eav'oq, because they see different things happening.) But again, I suspect that that difference in belief is there to provide some kind of payoff later on, although it may simply be as part of a theological conflict between Bajorans and Eav'oq.

Ending of the book: Tosk gets his payoff from the Hunters but gets to be true to himself; Dez and Jake also both realize they have to be true to themselves and thus are able to part on good terms. The discovery that the Jem'Hadar ship that rescued Jake was after the Even came as a bit of a shock -- Jake's new friends had a narrow escape. But that explains why, in Lesser Evil, it was a Dominion ship that handed over Jake, Opaka, and Wex. They didn't just happen to be there. Everything happens for a reason.

Gamma comment: one thing I missed in Mission: Gamma was references to and appearances by some of the Gamma races the DS9 gang encountered before the Dominion. I've already mentioned this above, but anyway it works nicely as a counterpoint to Mission: Gamma. Instead of having his own ship and his familiar faces, Jake (and later Opaka) is out there alone, having to find a way to get along from the inside -- but whereas Vaughn et al are dealing with new species, Jake at least has some familiar species to deal with. Notwithstanding the fact that the Ferengi and Cardassian characters are among the ones he spends the last time with. (If there's a follow-up novel with the crew of the Even Odds, I'd like Glessin to have a larger part than he had here.)

Jake's spiritual quandary, his frustration with the prophets, is understandable and well presented. Even if he comes to peace with it all, he should never be completely comfortable, because he and his family have, after all, been manipulated.

As for what comes next: the Ascendants will likely be a threat at some point, but for at least the next novel the focus is much more likely to be on the parasites. If the Ascendants do turn out to be the next major adversary for the DS9 regulars, it'll be a nice change of pace. The parasites were a good choice, coming out of established continuity that cried out for some kind of follow-up, and nicely set up in DS9 by The Lives of Dax. Creating a new threat that could only have come from DS9 for the next possible adversary is better yet. Continuity is great, but too much can become a crutch. Making something new that nonetheless fits the series concept so well is a sign that there's some good creative thinking going on. It's also a good way to look at Bajoran religion from another perspective. The events of the first several relaunch books have done nicely at looking at the religion from the inside, through the excommunicated Kira and the agnostic Ro. That will have to continue, as the return of Opaka is bound to have some dramatic effects on Bajoran society. But knowledge of the Eav'oq and the Ascendants will force the Bajorans to look at their society and their faith in a whole new context.

There's a lot of potential for Bajoran political and religious intrigue here, and I always enjoyed the episodes of that type. The story of Deep Space Nine is the story of Benjamin Sisko, but it's also the story of Bajor, and that got lost a bit during the Dominion War. The books have made up for that. However, there are an awful lot of plot threads in progress right now (Kira's attainder, Kasidy's pregnancy, Bajor joining the Federation, the parasites, Opaka's return, Shar's problems (and Andorian problems more generally), Ro and Quark, etc). I hope at least a few of these are resolved in Unity.

Voyager: Full Circle

2009-04-10T11:57:00.003-04:00

Warning: spoilers ahead.

You could make a checklist of all the things this book has to accomplish.

It has to resolve unfinished plot threads from Christie Golden's post-Endgame novels.
It has to make up for a few years without any post-Endgame novels.
It has to deal with what's happened to some of the Voyager characters in the Next Generation and Titan novels: Tuvok joining the Titan crew, Janeway being killed by the Borg.
It has to deal with the events of the Destiny trilogy, and how the end of the Borg affects Seven of Nine.
It has to establish a new direction for the Voyager novel line.
Oh, and, ideally, it should be a hell of a read.

Good thing the book is 561 pages long, then, because it has so much to do. And it hits every one of those targets.

As I've mentioned in the past, I tend to think of Voyager as a series of lost opportunities. All that groundwork laid in several Next Generation and Deep Space Nine episodes to create the opportunity for conflict between Maquis and Starfleet as Voyager struggles to survive far from home... pretty much ignored after a few episodes. Even Voyager's desperate position was often forgotten, as the crew had wacky hijinks on the holodeck, and new shuttles magically replaced all the shuttles destroyed over the years.

Then the series ended and everything the show was still about -- that is, getting home -- was resolved. It was time for a bold new rethink of what Voyager after Endgame could be about. Instead, we got Homecoming and The Farther Shore, which shuffled a couple of characters offstage as quickly as possible, showed everyone settling back in without much trouble, and went back to Voyager's last season for story ideas, doing yet another Borg crisis and the completely unthought-out holorevolution storyline. Throw in B'Elanna going nuts, Chakotay having magical adventures, and the crew getting a new counselor whose method of counseling is to get everyone together for a great big crying jag, and you've got a soggy spiritual mess of a lost opportunity.

And then there were no more relaunch novels for a few years. Golden was busy writing other books, and her editor, John Ordover, left Pocket. Handing Voyager over to a new editor and writer meant that it would take some time to rethink where the books should be going, and that took time. Meanwhile, other complicating factors came along: the book schedule was cut back, continuity between novel series was increasing, some big status quo-changing plans were in the works, and Voyager characters were appearing in other books. And Janeway died.

Full Circle is a novel of two halves: before Janeway dies, and after. There's an emotionally wrenching prologue in which Chakotay waits for Janeway to arrive for a long-planned dinner to mark the next stage of their relationship -- but she doesn't show up. Instead, her ex-fiance Mark Johnson arrives to tell him that Janeway's dead. After that, the first chapter moves back in time to a point shortly after Golden's novels. Much of the first half of the book wraps up her plotlines. Some things are done quickly and neatly; Astall, the new counselor, is replaced by Hugh Cambridge, who has a key role in the book that simply could not be performed by the hyperemotional Astall. The B'Elanna and Miral storyline, on the other hand, expands into an action-packed chase through Klingon space that could have been a novel in its own right. Meanwhile, we get glimpses into Starfleet's plans for Voyager and its crew through some new characters: Captain Afsarah Eden and Admiral Willem Batiste. Throughout all this, all of the Voyager regulars who returned to the Alpha Quadrant have a part to play.

Then Janeway dies. We don't see a recreation of what happens in Before Dishonor; instead, we see how this affects everyone left behind. And before the healing is done, Destiny's Borg invasion makes things worse. The ship is badly damaged, some people are killed or badly injured, and Seven finds herself in a strange new position again -- the Caeliar have removed her Borg implants and left her fully human, but they haven't taken her wherever the other former Borg and Caeliar have gone. And the person she had most depended on to help her find her way is dead.

Where much of the book's first half focuses on B'Elanna Torres and Tom Paris, Chakotay and Seven get much of the attention in the latter half, as the two people most damaged by their losses. Meanwhile, Starfleet's plans for Voyager -- equipping it with slipstream drive and sending it back to the Delta Quadrant with a fleet of slipstream ships to explore, to reestablish contact with friendly Delta Quadrant civilizations, and to ensure that the Borg threat really is gone -- continue to move forward. But how many of Voyager's key crew will go? And what happened to B'Elanna and Miral, whose names appear in a list of confirmed deaths in A Singular Destiny?

I've criticized Golden's Voyager relaunch novels for being driven by emotion; Full Circle is an emotional roller coaster ride, especially Chakotay's and Seven's very different descents into despair. But it's not cheap emotion. It's believable, raw, and real, and comes from a story that shows every sign of being composed with intelligence and thought rather than just gushers of feeling. That's where Cambridge comes in. Astall would have been utterly useless at helping Chakotay make sense of his problems. Cambridge helps Chakotay rebuild himself, to become once again the man who was Voyager's captain. But that's not where his future lies.

We've continued to learn more about Eden and Batiste through the novel, and it's not too surprising that Eden is to be Voyager's captain on its new journey. What is surprising is a revelation about Eden late in the book: she's not human, she doesn't know where she's from, but she recognized something from Voyager's files, and she's wondering if Voyager's departure from its home will lead her to her own. She's joined in her new mission by a few familiar faces in new roles.

But Chakotay and Seven are still on Earth, with their own new journeys. And it's probably just my shipper tendencies, but I could see this leading to a post-J/C pairing of C/7 that actually makes a degree of sense for these characters in their new lives. Not that Beyer is necessarily going there, but it could work better here than it did in Voyager's seventh season.

In other times, Full Circle might have been published as two or three separate books. It's a big book, but one that's compelling and well-written enough that I blazed through it. It does everything it needed to do: it ties off loose ends, it sets the stage for new stories, it tells a couple of complete stories of its own. And it pays tribute to Kathryn Janeway. It's a book for Voyager fans, because it respects the show's characters, and for its detractors, because it makes those characters more real and believable. It's a book that Voyager fans really should read, regardless of whether they like or dislike the idea of killing off Janeway, because it's a hell of a story. If there exists a Voyager fan who is centered exclusively on Janeway and actively dislikes every other character, that person might safely skip this book. Likewise anyone who insists it's not Voyager if Kes and Neelix aren't in it. But fans of the Janeway/Chakotay relationship should find this a powerful and devastating story, worth reading even if that relationship no longer has a future. So too should readers who like action rather than relationships, because there's a good amount of that, as well. Most importantly, despite so much happening in this book, it ends leaving the reader wanting to know what comes next. It's good to know that the follow-up is only a few months away, and that it's by Beyer, too.

IDW: Bringing me stuff I've bought and paid for three or four times already!

2009-04-07T22:51:00.003-04:00

Amazon's got some info on the next three volumes of IDW's Star Trek Archives (and the covers of only two of them). One looks like a straightforward reprint of the old DC trade paperback collection The Mirror Universe Saga (bought the comics, bought the DC paperback, bought the Trek comics DVD ROM). Another has a few issues reprinted by Titan just three years ago.

Dear IDW: I know, I already have damn near everything, so I'm not really the target market, but still: how about more obscure stuff for the Archives line?

Star Trek Archives Volume 5: The Best of Kirk

This six-issue collection includes the fan-favorite "Trial of James T. Kirk" written by New York Times best-selling author Peter David. As the Klingons and Nasguls pursue their vendetta against the captain, a deadly bounty hunter is eyeing the price they've placed on his head. But if Kirk is fortunate enough to survive the encounter, will he survive the attentions of his own Federation, eagerly looking for a scapegoat to preserve universal peace?

Due July 2009. At least some of this material has been published in trade paperback twice before. The three-part "Trial of James T. Kirk" appears in both DC's 1991 The Best of Star Trek and Titan's 2006 The Trial of James T. Kirk.

Star Trek Archives Volume 6: The Mirror Universe Saga

The treacherous but intriguing tales of Star Trek's Mirror Universe are presented in this collection of the 8-part Mirror Universe Saga! Witness the deception and desperation that unfolds as the Empire sets out to conquer another universe. It will take all the guile and cunning Kirk, Spock, and the crew of the Enterprise can muster if they hope to ward off the coming Empire invasion, and save themselves in the process!

Due September 2009. This appears to be a reprint of DC's 1991 collection, Star Trek: The Mirror Universe Saga, reusing the original's cover art. The book reprints a storyline from DC's Star Trek comic issues 9 to 16 from 1984-85. Though the cover art on Amazon shows the title as Best of Alternate Universes, Amazon lists it under the DC title, and IDW's solicitation covers are often different from the final versions, including titles.

Star Trek Archives Volume 7: Best of Klingons

In stories like "The Wormhole Connection," "The Only Good Klingon...," "Errand of War," "Deadly Allies," "Maggie's World," and "Judgment Day," get a close look at the relationship between the Federation and Klingon Empire. These fierce, warring people present unique challenges to the Federation, and in these classic DC stories get a glimpse of what the future holds for Federation-Klingon relations.

Due November 2009. If the information above is correct, this collection reprints the first four issues of DC's original run of Star Trek comics, which began in 1984, followed by issues 31 and 32 from 1986. The first four were reprinted in 2005 by Titan in their To Boldly Go reprint collection.

Nicholas Meyer's View From the Bridge

2009-04-07T22:44:00.003-04:00

Coming in September from Viking (text from catalogue):

The critically acclaimed director and writer shares his account of the making of the three classic Star Trek films

The View from the Bridge is Nicholas Meyer's enormously entertaining account of his involvement with the Star Trek films: STII: The Wrath of Khan, STIV: The Voyage Home, and STVI: The Undiscovered Country, as well as his illustrious career in the movie business. The man best known for bringing together Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud in The Seven Per-Cent Solution had ironically never been interested in Star Trek until he was brought on board to save the film series.

Meyer shares how he created the script for The Wrath of Khan, the most revered Star Trek film of all, in twelve days -- only to have William Shatner proclaim he hated it. He reveals the death threats he received when word got out that Spock would be killed, and finally answers the long-pondered question of whether Khan’s chiseled chest is truly that of Ricardo Montalban. Meyer’s reminiscences on everyone from Gene Roddenberry to Laurence Olivier will appeal not only to the countless legions of Trekkies, but to anyone fascinated by the inner workings of Hollywood.

Jewish Themes in Star Trek is finally available

2009-04-07T22:36:00.003-04:00

It's been years since Rabbi Yonassan Gershom first posted online about his work in progress. I mentioned it in my blog five years ago and it wasn't new then. Gershom was looking for a publisher, and eventually decided to self-publish. It's available now at lulu.com. I'll be ordering it soon. Here's the back cover copy:

Your unauthorized guide to the Jewish future!

Rabbi Gershom boldly takes you where few Trekkers have gone before!

You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy Jewish Themes in Star Trek, a well-researched and reader-friendly journey into Jewish themes, actors, writers, in-jokes and subtexts in the Star Trek Universe. Inspired by a class he taught at the Minneapolis Talmud Torah, the book explores such things as:

The Jewish origin of the Vulcan salute

How Vulcan culture is based on rabbinical Judaism

"Who is a Jew" in episodes, movies and novels

How Talmudic logic and rabbinic thinking helped expand the Star Trek universe

Plus: proof positive that the Ferengi were based on Yankee traders, not the Jews!

No, these scriptbooks aren't all going on the website

2009-04-07T20:00:00.003-04:00

Three years ago, Roddenberry.com started selling trade paperback collections of TOS scripts through cafepress.com. They did a dozen or so volumes, each containing the same old photocopied scripts and next to no new original content, and charged around $40 per volume. With that quality at that price, even I didn't bother buying them all, and I still had a job at the time.

So now Roddenberry.com has an even smarter idea: every episode of TOS and TNG, published as an individual trade paperback through cafepress, for $20 each. That's over $5,000 to get the full set. I assume they don't expect anyone to actually even think of buying all of them; this is just a replacement for the unbound photocopies they used to sell. But still, there has to be a better way (and a better pricing scheme) than this.

Star Trek Archives Volume 4: Best of Deep Space Nine

2009-04-04T20:57:00.002-04:00

If you're like me -- and you probably aren't, but let's pretend -- you think that the first two seasons of Deep Space Nine are underrated. There was a lot to like in those pre-Dominion, pre-Worf, pre-Defiant days. There was tension between the Federation and the Bajorans, the Cardassians kept hovering in the background, and the Gamma Quadrant was a place of mystery. No one knew who or what might come through the wormhole.

That's the Deep Space Nine we see in the new IDW reprint collection, Star Trek Archives Volume 4: Best of Deep Space Nine. It's not really a "best of" compilation; it's the first five issues of the comic from 1993 plus a short story included in an "ashcan" preview edition.

Written by Trek comics veteran Mike W. Barr, the early comics alternated between single-issue and two-issue stories.Like the show, the comics make use of the ensemble cast, and all of the regulars make appearances in this volume. Barr captures the characters' voices and personalities well, no small feat given the brevity of the stories. The stories also feel like the kind of stories we got early on in DS9. The opening two-parter, "Stowaway," deals with a threat to the station accidentally unleashed by Jake and Nog; the single issue story "Old Wounds" involves an old Cardassian general's visit to the station and becomes a murder mystery; the two-parter "Emancipation" echoes elements of "Captive Pursuit" and "Sanctuary," as a shipload of slaves from the Gamma Quadrant flees their owners and seeks freedom in Federation space. The stories may not have the kind of depth longer stories can offer, but they get the feel right, and the art isn't bad.

I'm a big DS9 fan, and I'm glad IDW is reprinting at least a few issues of the DS9 comics. Malibu never published any trade paperback reprint collections, and the UK Boxtree collections weren't widely distributed (if at all) in North America, though of course these comics are included in last year's DVD-ROM collection of Star Trek comics. I'd like to see IDW do more DS9 collections, and for that matter I'd like to see them get the license to publish new DS9 comics. If coordinating developments with the Pocket DS9 relaunch is problematic, there's no reason they couldn't do stories set during the TV series. The more DS9 the better.

Star Trek: Countdown

2009-04-02T08:10:00.003-04:00

Warning: lots of spoilers below.

Here's the most important thing to keep in mind while thinking about the comic prequel to the new movie:

TrekMovie: Well the bigger issue is more [Star Trek movie prequel comic] "Star Trek: Countdown" and whether or not that is considered canon. That is not a promotional thing, that is a…. thing thing. Your name, JJ’s name is on it and Alex’s name is on it. So canon or not canon?

Roberto Orci: I don’t think that is for me to decide. As you know I considered some of the books, in my mind, to be of character canon. And some of them in between the movies to possibly be even possible candidates for canon, until some other movie comes along and makes those impossible. That is my personal view, but I am not going to declare whether comics are canon.

So some things possibly might possibly be candidates for canon until they're contradicted by a movie (hey, Roberto: canon, by definition, is the stuff that the movies shouldn't contradict), and he won't say whether the comic is canon. It's the latter that's key here, because I'd hate to have to see the Star Trek novels having to tie into this story a few years from now, when they reach the year Countdown is set. Whichever year that is.

Countdown is setting the stage for the movie that's supposed to be a bold, fresh, new vision of Star Trek. Unfortunately, Countdown itself is hampered by everything that makes that new vision necessary: fanwank, technobabble, and yet another attempt at recapturing that Khan magic.

The first issue's not all bad. It introduces Nero, a Romulan working stiff whose ship is used in dangerous planetary mining expeditions. We haven't seen many ordinary Romulan civilians, and we get a bit of a sense of what their lives are like; Nero has a risky job, a loyal crew, and a pregnant wife at home. But the star of a planet he's trying to mine is flaring up.

And here comes the technobabble. The Hobus Star (it's always called The Hobus Star, never just Hobus) is going to go supernova. Not only that, it's likely to destroy the whole Romulan Empire unless the decalithium (oh, joy, another kind of lithium) Nero mines can be converted by top secret Vulcan technology into the mysterious and magical substance known as red matter (like dark matter, I guess, but more colourful). But wait, the supernova is changing. It could destroy the whole universe. Or maybe the whole galaxy. Depends which issue you're reading. Either way, it's scarier than Genesis and the Nexus combined. Now it's really really essential to get some decalithium converted into red matter to create a black hole to suck up the supernova. But the Vulcans aren't eager to help.

Fortunately, some people are willing to help. First, there's the starship captain who saves Nero's ship from some nasty Remans: why, it's Data! What a surprise! Looks like he got better after being killed in Nemesis. Then there's the Federation ambassador to Vulcan. Why, it's Jean-Luc Picard! What a surprise! (Vulcan, by the way, almost feels like it's not part of the Federation; they haven't shared red matter technology with anyone else, and they have their own ambassador on Romulus, where Spock lives and serves as the Federation ambassador. They also see Spock as a traitor.) Then there's the brilliant spacecraft designer who has the one ship that could possibly deliver the red matter into the supernova: why, it's Geordi LaForge! What a surprise! And then, when the plan works just a little too late and Romulus is wiped out, killing Nero's wife and unborn son (and a lot of other people), who's the general leading a Klingon battle fleet to stop Nero's quest for revenge? Why, it's Worf! What a surprise! The pages are practically stuck together with all the fanwank going on.

Nitpick: Romulans have green blood, not red (someone noticed that by the last issue).

The only connection to TOS is an image of Kirk on a monitor when Nero, as a guest of the Enterprise early on, pokes around the ship's library computer to see what he can learn.

So... why is Vulcan now almost belligerent towards the Romulans, Spock, and the Enterprise, when the Romulans have greatly improved relations with the Federation? Why is it necessary to wipe out the Romulan Empire (and, it's suggested, most of the Romulan people) with a scientifically wrongheaded big technobabble threat, when Nero's main concern is his wife and unborn child? Why is it necessary to bring Data back through B4, when Nemesis tells us that wouldn't work? Why have drastic career changes for Picard, LaForge, and Worf? And how much of this is going to end up established as definite canon through the movie?

For too long now, people making Trek movies have looked back to The Wrath of Khan as a model, forgetting that a lot of the best Star Trek TV episodes didn't have a big black hat villain. Nero is another Trek villain who starts out as a not bad guy who ends up a villain seeking an over-the-top, misguided revenge. There's a bit of Khan (whose wife and other frends died), there's a bit of Soran (who wasn't evil, originally, he just wanted to get back to the Nexus), there's a bit of Shinzon (the Romulan citizen who kills Romulan political leaders and gets a ridiculously powerful ship with unethical tech, though Shinzon got the ship first then wiped out the Romulan leadership), there's even a Borg connection (that's the unethical tech this time, instead of thalaron weapons)... well, the never-seen-before old Romulan tradition of shaving off your hair and tattooing your face and head as a sign of grief is something new.

I guess the writers of the comic (the movie's Orci and Kurtman get story credit, Mike Johnson and Tim Jones get the writing credit) wanted a Big Event story as a preface for the movie that changes everything. But, in my humble opinion, it comes off as a misfire too reminiscent of past Trek movies and of Pocket's Ordover Era, when the Federation/galaxy/universe was threatened with annihilation two or three times a year. They're just trying way too hard here to pile on the Bigness without thinking any of it through.

When the movie comes out, I don't think reading this will add a lot to the experience. It's highly unlikely that it will seem like a necessary bit of backstory to make sense of anything in the movie. So let's have it not be canon, please.

Consolidation

2009-04-01T11:09:00.001-04:00

I decided to delete the moribund old sjroby.blogspot.com blog and imported the Trek books-related posts to this blog. Hope it doesn't flood anyone's LJ page or rss reader or anything...

Thrilling Wonder Stories

2009-03-31T11:15:00.002-04:00

Haven't actually read all of this yet, but on the off chance that anyone reading this missed the news over at TrekBBS...

The second volume of the revived Thrilling Wonder Stories (a classic SF pulp magazine long ago, now a trade paperback series) is a Star Trek special. There's a bunch of short stories (SF, not Trek) by writers who've written for Star Trek, some reprints (by Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon, among others), some new, and several Trek-related nonfiction articles. Here's the back cover copy:

They imagined new worlds... new life... new civilizations

They're the writers of Star Trek and we've got them here!

All-new stories from writers of TV Trek:
David Gerrold ("The Trouble With Tribbles")
Norman Spinrad ("The Doomsday Machine")
Larry Niven (the animated series' "The Slaver Weapon")
Michael Reaves (TNG's "Where No One Has Gone Before") and Steve Perry
Diane Duane (TNG's "Where No One Has Gone Before")
Melinda M. Snodgrass (TNG's "The Measure of a Man")
David R. George III (Voyager's "Prime Factors")

and classic stories from
Jerry Sohl ("The Corbomite Maneuver")
Richard Matheson ("The Enemy Within")
Harlan Ellison ("The City on the Edge of Forever")
Theodore Sturgeon ("Amok Time")
Plus "Arena" by Fredric Brown, the basis of the TV episode, and an unproduced original series storyline by George Clayton Johnson ("The Man Trap")

Marc Scott Zicree, novelist and writer of DS9's "Far Beyond the Stars," celebrates the literary writers who worked on big and small-screen Trek

Crystal Ann Taylor tells the behind-the-scenes story of "World Enough and Time," award-winning episode of Internet series Star Trek: Phase II with George Takei as Sulu

Adam Weiner says "I Canna Change the Laws of Physics!"... but the writers of Star Trek don't have any such qualms!

We take you inside Columbus of the Stars, a 1964 television series proposed by writer-director Ib Melchior (Robinson Crusoe on Mars) about a multinational starship crew visiting unexplored worlds... and show how the pitch crossed paths with a writer-producer named Gene Roddenberry

So it's not technically a Star Trek book, certainly not an official one... but it's a book that should be of interest to anyone who's a fan of Star Trek in particular and science fiction in general. For more information, or to order a copy, visit the Thrilling Wonder Stories website.

Over a Torrent Sea

2009-03-31T10:04:00.001-04:00

I meant to do a proper, lengthy review of Over a Torrent Sea, but the last month or so has been a bit chaotic. Getting back from a week and a half housesitting with Laura at her dad's place (keeping an eye on two cats and two dogs, one of the latter old and ill), getting back in time to prepare for my first job interview in too long and then dealing with the disappointment of not getting it, only to get another interview elsewhere for a job I'd've been a really good fit for, and then not getting that either... well, it hasn't been conducive to concentrating on long novels and writing a lot about them.

All that said, here's a quick comment.

Over a Torrent Sea is what I've come to expect from both a Titan novel and a Christopher Bennett novel. It's the kind of science fiction storytelling that Star Trek books don't often do, being about exploration and worldbuilding. In other words, not unlike Bennett's last Titan novel, Orion's Hounds. This time around it's planet-based exploration, but it's no ordinary planet. The Titan crew explore a water world and its mysterious life forms. There's a lot of exploration of the science of this kind of planet and its inhabitants, but I didn't find it excessive or difficult to follow (apparently some readers on the TrekBBS did). Meanwhile, there's a lot of character exploration as well, with Riker, Troi, Ree, Lavena, Pazlar, and Ra-Havreii getting a lot of attention this time around.

The book's B-story is a bit of an odd fit in some respects; at first it feels more like it's about building on events from the Destiny trilogy relating to Troi's pregnancy than being a part of this story, but it does explore Ree's character. Also, being about Troi's pregnancy, it ties in to the other story threads that relate to families and relationships. As I recall, Bennett was somewhat surprised by the extent to which people found family to be a strong theme throughout his last Next Generation novel, Greater Than the Sum, but it's really prominent here.

I found the last Titan novel, Geoffrey Thorne's Sword of Damocles, a frustrating read; it seemed like a new author trying too hard to do something different stylistically and not quite pulling it off. So I'm happy that (in my opinion, of course) Over a Torrent Sea is a solid return to form for the Titan series.

Chronic Rift presents Canon Fodder

2009-03-08T13:12:00.002-04:00

The latest episode of the Chronic Rift podcast is available, and it features yours truly as the fan perspective in a discussion of media tie-in books. The host is John S. Drew and the pros are Keith R.A. DeCandido and Jeff Mariotte. It was fun, and may sound like it, too, so why not check it out? You can get it from iTunes, the Rift web site, or podOmatic's Rift page (links swiped from KRAD's LJ).

Back around 1992 or so I ended up in a science fiction fan roundtable on the local CBC radio station's afternoon drive time show, because a co-worker knew I was a fan and his wife was a producer at the station who was looking for people to participate. I have a tape of it around here somewhere, but haven't listened to it. Probably just as well. In the podcast discussion, I was dealing with a couple of people I've interacted with online, and one whose blog I used to read regularly, all of whom I've read fiction by. I was a lot more comfortable this time around.

Thanks for inviting me, John!

Star Trek books websites dying out?

2009-02-16T11:34:00.002-05:00

A few years ago, there were several large websites devoted to Star Trek books, and at least a few active and interesting forums devoted to the subject. But things don't look quite so healthy now.

The book section of John Patuto's Cygnus X-1 Star Trek LCARS Book and Episode Database hasn't been updated since 2006. David Henderson's Psi Phi Star Trek books site has had a couple of sporadic updates in 2008, but the database itself is still long gone.

Meanwhile, my own Trek books website still gets updated, but after a decade or so still doesn't get a lot of hits.

Maybe those sites are fading because people prefer web 2.0 sites... but Memory Beta is a long way from being ready to meet everyone's needs. Even the site's name (Memory Beta Non-Canon Star Trek Wiki) marginalizes itself with the use of the phrase "non-canon." Someone who wants info on books but hasn't bothered hanging out on BBSes or forums through a dozen canon thrashes is just going to wonder what the hell that's supposed to mean.

As for the content, some of it is plagiarized from other sources (the summary of Mack Reynolds's Mission to Horatius looks a lot like a shortened and rewritten version of my site's summary of the book). There are gaps in coverage, too, and some entries are badly written. There may be a lot of enthusiasm but it still has a long way to go.

Web 2.0 sites like wikis do have a certain advantage in that the wiki model allows them to keep going long after whoever gets them started loses interest or moves on to something else. Cygnus X-1, Psi Phi, and the Complete Starfleet Library each depend on a single person staying with it, year after year after year. Let it slide just a few months, and you've got a lot of hours' work to bring it back up to date (speaking from experience, and thinking it's time to do some more updating now).

Meanwhile, the official Pocket Books discussion area has been replaced by a new, harder to use forum -- but given how moribund the old one had been for the last few years, with a very small core group of regulars, it almost doesn't matter. The Psi Phi board, which was the most vibrant and vital Trek discussion area a decade or so ago, is a ghost of its former self.

The healthiest discussion area right now still seems to be TrekBBS. It has a lot of participation from the writers and from passionate fans. Jackie Bundy's Star Trek Books Yahoo group seems to be fairly healthy, if not as busy as the TrekBBS, but personally I'm not a fan of Yahoo Groups in general. Book discussion at the official Star Trek website seems to be an afterthought; there's a "Books & Products" discussion area that has a number of regulars, but the writers seem to participate less often there, and the general tone is more newbie-friendly, but not terribly informative.

Here's hoping the new movie reignites people's interest in all the Trek stuff out there, and not just in the new movie alone.

A Singular Destiny

2009-02-07T13:22:00.006-05:00

There are a lot of stories in the Star Trek universe that we never see, because our viewpoint is usually restricted to Starfleet officers. But Starfleet officers can't do everything, especially during a crisis that's more political than military. In the wake of the events of Destiny, political connections are being broken and new ones made. If you're going to see what's happening at the highest levels, you need someone other than a Starfleet officer.

So that's who we get here: Sonek Pran, history professor and diplomatic troubleshooter. He's been shut out of political/diplomatic work during the Bush administration, but now that Obama -- I mean, he's been shut out during the Min Zife administration, but with Nan Bacco as president, his skills are once more recognized by a less ideological leadership and he's called on to serve the Federation. (Sorry... dunno if KRAD meant to make any parallels there, but it works for me.)

Sonek Pran is the lead character of the story, but given the way it draws on sinister events happening in various places, we get to see a number of familiar faces, including characters from SCE/COE and IKS Gorkon/Klingon Empire, and, more prominently, President Nan Bacco from Articles of the Federation and Ezri Dax, captain of the U.S.S. Aventine, as seen in the Destiny trilogy. Some major developments have happened in the lives of some SCE/COE and IKGS/KE characters since their last appearances, and they're handled well; the developments are plausible, as is their being part of this particular story. Just as important, if you haven't encountered the characters before, I doubt you'll find yourself lost or wondering what you missed. Bacco and her staff are handled well, as you'd expect from the author who created them, but they don't get enough screen time to make this a full sequel to Articles of the Federation. Nonetheless, fans of that book will enjoy this. Ezri Dax gets some important character moments that almost seem as though they were written with the knowledge that some fans would have issues with her in the Destiny trilogy. I didn't; several years have passed between her latest appearance in the DS9 books and the beginning of Destiny, and in that time she obviously progressed on the command track and came completely to terms with her joining, which gives her centuries of experience to draw on. And she received command because of a crisis situation. In A Singular Destiny, though the details are already fading from my memory (why didn't I write this a week ago?), there were scenes in which Dax seemed to tackle the issue of her suitability for command head-on. I'm curious what her detractors think of her characterization here. I think their concerns have been addressed.

Speaking of various people and places, KRAD uses a classic literary technique to give us much more of a sense of how the Federation's been affected by the Borg invasion, using short news articles, correspondence, log entries, and reports between chapters to show how much more has happened than this one story can focus on. I think the first book I read that did this sort of thing was Joe Haldeman's Mindbridge, which included in its dedication "Johns Brunner and Dos Passos pro forma". Not long after that I read John Brunner's classic SF disaster novels Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, which use that technique, and years later I finally read the USA trilogy by Dos Passos, one of the best literary examples of the technique. It's really effective for giving snapshots of the wider context while focusing on a more intimate story. Heck, I wouldn't have minded if there'd been more of that kind of thing in this book. Given its position as sort of a linking volume between Destiny and what comes next, and its not being about one of our regular sets of characters, it's the most suitable choice for this kind of storytelling.

So, back to Sonek Pran. I think in a couple of respects he wasn't quite 100% successful as a character. He seems a bit too perfect, and some things come a bit too easy to him. The business with him being a great communicator who can't talk to his own son also seemed a bit cliched. On the other hand, he's a new-to-us character in a novel with a hell of a lot to do; there's no time to really build him up. From an in-story perspective, there's no time for him to learn his skills because the Federation needs him to do his thing, do it right, and do it right now. From an out-of-story perspective, he's not going to be a lead character in a series of books, so we don't have the luxury of a few stories to see him become the perfect communicator he is. (Not that I'd mind if he reappears occasionally in future books.)

After all, the importance of communication is what this book is about. Part of the mysterious plan going on in the book proves to revolve around false information, others on diplomacy, others on withheld information. Sonek Pran is needed to get people talking again after the disruptive catastrophe of the Borg invasion. Sonek talking to his son near the end of the book reinforces the message. In a more sinister development, we learn that the catastrophe has led to other people communicating, too -- and forming a new alliance, one that's set to play a key role in many future novels.

Writing a book like this is a bit of a thankless task, I suspect. It isn't all about action. It's about what happens afterwards: trying to make sense of the new world you find yourself in, and only starting to realize that the end of one problem is just the beginning of a new set of a problems. KRAD takes on the challenge of telling that story -- and of using some new characters to do it -- and meets it, crafting a story that kept me reading, eager to learn what would happen next; a story that puts pieces in motion for what comes next, and raises whole sets of new questions for readers paying attention (hope you didn't just skim through that casualty report). It's a big satisfying read that takes care of your first set of "what happens next?" questions and gives you some new ones.

2008 in review

2009-01-10T08:10:00.007-05:00

2008 was a mixed bag of a year for Star Trek books. Some great books were published and some long-anticipated events came to pass. But the original ebook line came to an end with the conclusion of the TNG miniseries Slings and Arrows, it was the first year since 1997 without a Strange New Worlds anthology, and one of the guiding lights of Star Trek publishing over the last several years, Marco Palmieri, was laid off in a cost-cutting exercise.

On the upside, it was the year we finally got Myriad Universes. The idea of doing a series of "what if?" alternate universe takes on Star Trek had been discussed for years. Not only did it finally happen, it was worth waiting for, with six short but good novels in two books. For fiction, it was almost a case of big event books every time out. DS9 fans had the Terok Nor trilogy and the latest post-finale novel; TNG fans had the latest post-Nemesis novel, which in turn led up to the big Destiny trilogy; Enterprise fans had the latest post-finale novel setting the pieces in place for the Romulan War. Neither last nor least, the IKS Gorkon books morphed into Klingon Empire, with a big, sprawling story of life in the Empire as we've never seen it before. Add the latest SCE omnibus and the end of the ebook TNG anniversary Slings and Arrows miniseries, and it was a remarkable year for fiction.

Illustrated fiction -- i.e., comics -- had a pretty good year, too, as IDW continued publishing a variety of comic miniseries and reprinting them in trade paperback collections. They've published more than Wildstorm, the last Trek comics publisher, and I'll be surprised if they aren't around for a while yet. Their Archives project is interesting, though also frustrating -- they've reprinted material that was recently reprinted in Titan's run of reprint collections. But then duplication is inevitable from here on out. Everyone bought the Star Trek DVD-ROM comics reprint collection, right? Not a book, of course, but for Star Trek comics fans, this reasonably priced disc was one of the year's must-buy items, collecting almost every Star Trek comic published prior to the IDW run. Tokyopop produced their third Trek manga this year, too, helping IDW make up for the relative shortage of TOS content in the novels.

It wasn't a great year for nonfiction, authorized or otherwise. Pocket published two relatively lightweight books, one useful, the other just a novelty item. Star Trek 101 was the useful one, being an episode guide to all the Star Trek TV series. Captain Kirk's Guide to Women... well, it's not the silliest Star Trek-related book I've ever bought. But it's close.

It was a mixed year for William Shatner. There's no sign on the horizon of Trial Run, the second Star Trek Academy book, but as a pop culture icon, he's doing fine. He published his third autobiographical book, this one dealing with his career Up Till Now instead of just his Star Trek Memories. He's also the subject of the Encyclopedia Shatnerica, the second edition of which was published this year.

In other nonfiction, there's The Wrath of Kant: Star Trek and Philosophy, one in a long running series of books with articles looking at various pop culture phenomena, and the BFI TV Classics book simply called Star Trek, a short but insightful critique of the various Star Trek TV series. More conventional fan-targeted books: Star Trek: The Collectibles and the latest in the vanity press-published Star Trek Reader's Reference books looking at Star Trek fiction. Out at the fringes, there's a vanity press episode guide worth mentioning only because of its author (Tessa Dick, Philip K. Dick's fifth wife). The Klingon Language Institute moved beyond Shakespeare and Gilgamesh to produce Tao Te Ching: A Klingon Translation: pIn'a' qan paQDI'norgh. And, finally, though Star Trek is only a small part of the book, there was some excitement early in the year over Beyond the Clouds: The Lifetime Trek of Walter "Matt" Jefferies, Artist and Visionary. It's a nicely produced and beautifully illustrated tribute to one of the unsung heroes of the original series, the man who designed the U.S.S. Enterprise.

2008 was a long way from the peak years of the mid-1990s, when twice as many books were being published, but it's a lot better than 2005, which holds the record for the fewest Star Trek books published since 1990.

Meanwhile, back at the Complete Starfleet Library website...

2009-01-04T19:57:00.002-05:00

I've been playing with adding a forthcoming books list. The current version is here, and it links to another alternative I was toying with, a Google docs spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has certain advantages -- it's set up with five sheets, so though you can't manipulate the data you can see the list sorted five different ways. But it's easy to add links to the item entries on the good ol' HTML page. Might be doable on the spreadsheet, too; I'll have to investigate that. But how complicated do things have to be?

Meanwhile, the site's been updated with the info from TrekMovie.com's Margaret Clark interview. In the near future I'll post some comments on 2008 in review and how the future looks from here.

Thanks, Marco

2008-12-04T20:57:00.002-05:00

Robert Greenberger reported earlier today that Marco Palmieri was one of 35 Simon and Schuster employees laid off today. That sucks. In many ways. I've been living with the dubious joys of being laid off for most of the year myself, and, no, it doesn't feel better to know that other people are in the same situation. So I hope Marco lands on his feet and gets something good soon.

Obviously I've really enjoyed the books that Marco's been involved with, and I think he'll be missed, but I'd like to thank him for a couple of other things.

I want to thank Marco (and John Ordover) for inviting me to drop by the Pocket Star Trek books offices when I was in New York for a conference a few years ago, for showing Laura and me around, for giving me some neat freebies, and for taking us to lunch along with Keith DeCandido. I was having so much fun it never even occurred to me to get autographs or take pictures, much less try to pitch book or story ideas.

And thanks again to Marco for giving me the occasional advance peek at forthcoming Star Trek novels, in exchange for nothing more than my thoughts on them. A few of the reviews on this blog are revised versions of the comments I sent him, with the Destiny trilogy being the most recent examples.

So... thanks and good luck.

Star Trek Collectibles

2008-12-01T21:06:00.002-05:00

I could have sworn I posted here about Steve Kelley's Star Trek: The Collectibles book, and this was going to be a follow-up... but it seems I didn't post about that. So: two posts in one.

Star Trek: The Collectibles by Steve Kelley

This is a good book, well illustrated in full colour, but it's not the ultimate collectibles book. But then, you couldn't do that in a single volume. So this book focuses strictly on original series-related collectibles. It's well-documented evidence that Steve Kelley has one hell of a collection, but it's hard to be certain how comprehensive it is beyond that. The selection of books, for example, seems kind of arbitrary. Obviously not all Trek books are collectibles, and you could fill a whole book just dealing with Star Trek books, but I'm not sure how Steve decided which books to include and which not to.

Steve's also included some unlicenced/unauthorized material, but there's an endless amount of that kind of stuff out there, so again I'm not sure what criteria were used for determining what should be in and what should be out.

Still, there's a lot of neat stuff in here, it's fun to browse through, and it's the first book of its kind in several years. Definitely worth a look.

The Unofficial Guide to Star Trek Collectibles (magazine)

According to Steve Kelley, this is something of a one-off, though if it sells sufficiently well, there'll be more issues. I wouldn't mind seeing more, but then, I wouldn't mind writing something book-related for it, either.

The good stuff:

The magazine has a nice, clean, easy to follow layout, with actual black text on white pages. Designers of other magazines should keep in mind that this is common not because of lack of originality, but because it's easy to read. (Star Trek Magazine, I'm looking at you.)
It's good to see some more detailed information on a variety of collectibles than the book had room for.
I also like the inclusion of Star Trek books, complete with a David Mack interview.

Not so good:

The interviews often feel like the same list of questions, with just slight changes, was emailed to several recipients.
The interviews look like unedited back-and-forth email exchanges. Obviously you don't want to rephrase the answers you get, but you can do something other than having the same question/answer/question/answer format each time. And if the interviewee doesn't have anything to say, it's okay to leave that Q&A out. (Three or four interviews end with, "Is your company doing anything tied into the new movie?" followed by an extended PRspeak remix of "No."
Though it's good to see some non-TOS material, the "TOS is best!" bias that made the book just a sampling of Trek memorabilia (leaving out the other series for possible future volumes) is not just present but downright intrusive here, as several licensees are asked leading questions about TOS vs other series.

If there are going to be future books and magazines, they may have to move beyond the focus on stuff that Steve Kelley personally finds interesting, from the type of collectibles covered to a greater appreciation for post-TOS Star Trek. A more inclusive approach is necessary. (IMHO, of course.)

Destiny Book III: Lost Souls

2008-11-27T14:18:00.003-05:00

I should have known better. I was really wondering just how dark the conclusion of the story would be, just how far David Mack was going to go, but instead the book had a surprisingly upbeat ending. Not for everyone, of course, and Nan Bacco quite rightly points out that the Federation and its allies have been badly wounded. But many of our regulars come out of the story in a better place than when they went in -- Picard and Troi in particular. It looks like the former Seven of Nine may come out of the experience as a very different person, though. Still, it's a good conclusion -- the threat is eliminated, but there's a new state of uncertainty that can generate a lot of possible problems for the Federation. And a lot of stories for the writers who'll be picking up the pieces.

Writing about the first book, I said, "I think a case could be made that it's conveniently coincidental that the Aventine and Titan missions are both connecting to the Caeliar at roughly the same time, but that's not something I'm going to worry about. This is fiction, and in fiction, we usually expect separate storylines to converge at some point." I really should have followed that line of thought a bit farther. I was initially a little surprised that we got some flashback sequences with Pembleton et al in this one, and briefly thought that it was primarily to give the books a parallel structure, each having a major flashback storyline, but it didn't take too long to figure out where things were going. It makes perfect sense, after all, but at the same time, the origin of the Borg is one of those things that's been played around with before and never seemed like a good idea (Shatner's The Return, a story in one of the Tokyopop manga collections). But if you have the freedom and the audacity to not only end the Borg story but also begin it, and you can do it in a way that makes sense in the context of both this particular story and the Star Trek universe as a whole, why not?

I find myself almost at a loss for things to say this time, because so much has been resolved that I don't have loose threads to pull on. The story's a temporal cloverleaf that loops back to a surprising beginning and ends in a satisfying conclusion. It's elegantly done. There must have been a lot of outlining and careful planning to work out how the time travel elements would play out, which characters would participate in which storylines, and so on. And it all comes together so well. This book couldn't have been written the way too many Star Trek TV cliffhanger stories were done, with the first part finished before the writers started on the second. It had to have been really carefully thought through, but from the reader's perspective, it feels almost effortless.

I read the first half of the book one Friday night after finishing another book. On Saturday I got up and read through to the end with only the briefest pauses possible. It's a long book, as are the first two volumes, but the momentum of the story pulls the reader through. And Mack's prose helps; it's clean, flowing, and effective.

Last time I mentioned the shagging line from the second book. One bit I liked this time around: at the bottom of the page, someone advises Martok that the Borg are advancing on several planets, including Rura Penthe. Who cares about Rura Penthe, I thought, and turned the page. "Who cares about Rura Penthe?" Martok asks. It's a little thing, but it makes what could have been just a continuity reference into a believable and funny moment. There are a lot of continuity references in the book, but they serve the purpose of the story rather than simply being padding for trivia buffs.

The book needed moments like the Cestus III family reunion scene; it was grim at times, and the visit to Deneva reminded the reader of the losses suffered, but there had to be some good, happy stuff. And the scene with Picard and Riker discussing fatherhood was great, reminding us of how well those characters worked together in TNG at its best, while also underlining just how far we've come since the show went off the air.

All in all, it's a great story that puts the reader and the characters through the wringer but ends positively and with a proper Star Trek sense of hope and new possibilities. It's sort of like the ending of Star Trek – The Motion Picture on a much bigger scale, with the Borg becoming Caeliar reminiscent of the V'Ger probe joining with Decker to create something new. And though there were inevitably be hardships for our heroes to contend with, at least the Borg are done with.

Now, of course, I can't wait to see what happens next.

Blast from the past

2008-11-19T10:11:00.006-05:00

Paradise Lost: The Return of the Serpent Part One, written by Michael Carlin (DC Comics Star Trek 43, October 1987 issue)

(As reviewed in the lettercol of issue 47 by Steve Roby. I can't believe Robert Greenberger printed such a long letter. Yeah, I've been playing with the Star Trek: The Complete Comic Book Collection DVD-ROM, about which I was going to post a review, but basically, it would come down to this: this is an insanely affordable way to get a huge amount of Star Trek fun. And a lot of crap, too. But any Trek fan with the least interest in Trek comics should have already bought a copy. Anyway, one of the neat features is that each comic is scanned whole, cover to cover, including letter columns when they appear. I was a bit of a letterhack for a brief period, starting after university and ending around the time my old best friend from high school moved to town and I got my first serious girlfriend and I was working fulltime, so I didn't have as much time as I used to. Near as I can tell Bob printed eight more of my letters. One feature the DVD could use is searchable text, but that would probably have made the job a lot more difficult. And the end result a lot more expensive. But it was neat spotting letters from Ian McLean, John S. Drew, and Glenn Greenberg, who I assume is the same Glenn Greenberg who's written some Trek comics and SCE/COE stories, and it was fun reading Bob's own little bits in the lettercol.)

So here's the first appearance in an official Star Trek publication of a then 24-year-old blowhard.

Dear Bob,
What's wrong with Star Trek #43:

1) The cover. What is this, a kiddie monster comic? Many of your readers are adults and being one myself I'd like to see something a bit more dignified and sophisticated.

2) The monster. If, as Spock suspected, the monster was never truly there, why would one more phaser make a difference? I hope this will be explained, perhaps as part of Akuta's power. Remember, Star Trek is science fiction, not space fantasy. Provide explanations for what happens, and let them at least seem scientifically sound.

3) Another prime directive story -- complete with Kirk and the crew being seen as gods. Does "Mortal Gods" ring a bell? Or how about "Wolf on the Prowl," with its culture contaminated by Redjac to lure the Enterprise, including a depiction of Kirk? As if the orignial Star Trek didn't wear out the story potential in the Prime Directive.

4) The treatment of women in the story. Primitive societies don't necessarily have to be shown as sexist, as this one appears to be. Makora, at least, is a definite MCP. Bryce doesn't get a chance to do anything, she just waits around to be rescued by the men. A situation which allowed Bryce to escape on her own, perhaps with Konom's assistance, could have been more interesting.

5) Konom. A person who is so deeply opposed to violence that he almost allows himself to be killed by a big monster would be disturbed by violent acts committed by anyone. To make everything all right by having others do the fighting for him seems inconsistent.

6) "They're dead, Jim!" Whether the crew is dead or merely seems to be, it's been done, and everybody will be fine later on.

7) Akuta's mutterings, combined with two and six above, suggest an element of the supernatural. I hope I'm wrong on this one, because "supernatural science fiction" is oxymoronic.

On the brighter side, here's what I liked:

1) I liked the way the events on page 14, about Bryce, mirrored the events on page 13, featuring Konom. It was a nice touch.

2) Makora has become the bad guy and Akuta the good guy -- or is he? The characters are less predictable this time around.

3) Another Prime Directive story? Well, it is, but with a difference. There's no Phil Hodges or U.S.S. Horizon or Ron Tracey or Captain Merek or John Gill to blame. This time, Kirk is cleaning up his own mess. It's about time. The possibilities for this story are so numerous and diverse that I expect the complete story will more than make up for the things I disliked about the first part.

Steve Roby