I understand Chris Chapel's main purpose on TOS was her crush on Spock, but are there any good novels about this character beyond this one aspect?
Certainly! She appears in several great scenes in the ST III novelization, even though Chapel did not appear in the film. Other interesting Chapel stories include "Night Whispers" (with Will Decker) in "Enterprise Logs", the rarely-mentioned novel "The Trellisane Confrontation" (Chapel's on the cover!), and "The Errand of Vengeance" trilogy, a "lower decks" treatment of events paralleling "Balance of Terror" and "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" Don't forget that she becomes Captain Sulu's CMO in the "Excelsior" novels.
"Leonard, wake up!" "Computer, don't call me Leonard!" Hahahaaa. She's in The Lost Era novel "The Sundered" as the Excelsior's CMO, and gets to shine quite a bit there.
thank you! thank you! I do have some of the books mentioned, but I have not read any of the Cpt Sulu novels or Ex Machina. I always thought she could be a really interesting character~ more complicated than she seemed.
I find it surprising that Chapel hasn't been given more 'air-time' in stories. They set her up with an interesting background in bio-research, archaeology, paleobiology, and exobiology (her work with Korby) and almost nobody has built on that since her first appearance. I think her later problem was that making her an MD instead head of life sciences means that she has no separate niche. She will always be second fiddle to McCoy. I featured her in my online Youtube comic as the more scientific doctor and I've found it almost too easy to feature her instead of McCoy as far as plot devices are concerned because I try to feature characters based on their merits and qualifications and McCoy is just an old country doctor, albeit he is a far more fun character to write. I do think Chapel deserves a bigger slice of the pie than she's had so far. Lets hope she gets more than one line in the movie sequel.
I just watched Pt II of Angels of Acheron~ that's terrific! Do you have a program that inks over the stills? I loved the look of it. I'm excited to see how the story turns out.
It's not too hard. You can use Gimp2 and download the comic book filter. I use comic book 2. A lot of the motion picture images are quite dark so you have to increase brightness and decrease contrast a little bit but most often the effect is quite groovy. But I think Chapel isn't really in part 2 much, she features more in parts 3 and 5 and part 1 of the second story. She's also in part 3 of the second story that I'm hoping to upload next week.
"Crossover by Barbara Hambly" I think somebody has something crossed: Hambly wrote Crossroad, a TOS era book Friedman wrote Crossover, a TNG era book.
^Oops! Sorry, I meant Crossroad, of course. I got my Crosses crossed, and now I'm all cross with myself.
Generally, when I think of Barbara Hambly, I think of a crossover of a different sort. One that breaks the fifth wall (or is it the sixth?).
Righto, part 3 of Shadow Puppets uploaded. Chapel is still a bit peripheral but probably gets more dialogue than Spock in this one.