So What Are you Reading?: Generations

[Defcon]

JD wrote:

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Started reading Work is Hard, Greg Cox's Pakled story in ST: Seven Deadly Sins. I'm not real far into it, but it's been pretty good so far. It's nice to get a TNG story set during the series with everybody still around.

That definitely was the biggest positive suprise for me in Seven Deadly Sins. From my review of the anthology from two years ago:

The anthology ends with Greg Cox’s Pakled story Work is Hard, featuring the sin Sloth. When the Enterprise intercepts a distress signal from a Pakled ship they’re not to keen to answer it given their history with Pakled distress signals, but ultimately have no choice. They soon learn that the emergency is real and Geordi, among those most disgusted by their past dealings with Pakleds, has to work closely with their engineer to help rescue the ship. Will he be able to make the engineer understand what to do in time?


Surprisingly, it’s a very decent story. To be honest I had my doubt if Cox, or anyone else for that matter, would be able to tell a readable story featuring the Pakleds so heavily, but he succeeded. Granted, the Pakled engineer seems to be one of the brighter bulbs in a sea of low-wattage ones, but he remains Pakled enough for me to let it slide. While in the end it remains what I guess it was aimed to be – the comic relief story – Cox was able to make it an engaging story, too, and you actually begin to root for Snollicob, the Pakled engineer. Work is Hard maybe isn’t the best story in the anthology, but the biggest positive suprise for me.

[Use of Time]

Reading the old Howard Weinstein novel The Covenant of the Crown. It's a short one with a pretty simple premise. Not a whole lot of substance in this one.

[Christopher]

Use of Time wrote:

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Reading the old Howard Weinstein novel The Covenant of the Crown. It's a short one with a pretty simple premise. Not a whole lot of substance in this one.

Actually, for one of the short novels from that era, it's got plenty of substance -- great character work for the Spock-McCoy pair and for Kirk separately, and some nice ruminations about the nature of leadership. It's always been a favorite of mine.

[Use of Time]

Christopher wrote:

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Actually, for one of the short novels from that era, it's got plenty of substance -- great character work for the Spock-McCoy pair and for Kirk separately, and some nice ruminations about the nature of leadership. It's always been a favorite of mine.

Maybe it has to do with me being a former Army Officer but I feel like I've heard every single take on leadership in existance. I just didn't find anything that I haven't heard before with regards to leadership in this book. If I would have had read this book in 1981 then maybe I would appreciate the character work with the big three but I have read pretty much every other TOS novel there is so I'm not really pulling anything out of this that I haven't heard before.

[Greg Cox]

Defcon wrote:

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That definitely was the biggest positive suprise for me in Seven Deadly Sins. From my review of the anthology from two years ago:

Thanks! I admit that writing 20,000 words about "Sloth" was a challenge.

Everybody else got the fun sins, like Lust and Wrath, but me . . . I got stuck with Sloth!

[John Clark]

I'm giving the SCE series a go. I've been meaning to give them a try for a while.

[Lonemagpie]

Defcon wrote:

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That definitely was the biggest positive suprise for me in Seven Deadly Sins. From my review of the anthology from two years ago:

Nice review- don't think I've seen it before. Or if so I'd forgotten

As for me, I finished Secret Of Crickley Hall, and think I'll go with maybe Stephen King's Under The Dome next...

[JD]

John Clark wrote:

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I'm giving the SCE series a go. I've been meaning to give them a try for a while.

You should, it's a lot of fun. I think in a way it felt the most like a TV show of any of the book series. It told smaller, standalone stories that tended to have character arcs that ran through several books.

[Sho]

Yep, I remember thinking the same, in terms of story length and 'week to week' character development reading SCE felt a lot like watching a show, and in a good way - a bunch of people you pay a visit to once a week, sort of. It even had the occassional epic multi-parter and flashback 'episode' to shake things up. There's some really good stories there. Enjoy!

[Patrick O'Brien]

Just finished The Eternal Tide and Tempest Wake, both good reads. Now onto Jeff Lang's TNG novel Immortal Coil, so I can be ready for David Mack's new book which is a sequel to this

[Kertrats47]

Pausing all my other reads to quickly read Jeffrey Lang's TNG: Immortal Coil on the advice of David Mack. As Patrick notes above, Mack's new novel is apparently a sequel to this one.

[Christopher]

^Not just his new novel, but the entire Cold Equations trilogy is a followup to Immortal Coil.

[John Clark]

JD wrote:

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You should, it's a lot of fun. I think in a way it felt the most like a TV show of any of the book series. It told smaller, standalone stories that tended to have character arcs that ran through several books.

Sho wrote:

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Yep, I remember thinking the same, in terms of story length and 'week to week' character development reading SCE felt a lot like watching a show, and in a good way - a bunch of people you pay a visit to once a week, sort of. It even had the occassional epic multi-parter and flashback 'episode' to shake things up. There's some really good stories there. Enjoy!

I have enjoyed them so far. I'm just starting on Immortal coil, then it'll either be Persistence of Memory or on to SCE:Interphase

[Patrick O'Brien]

Christopher wrote:

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^Not just his new novel, but the entire Cold Equations trilogy is a followup to Immortal Coil.

Cool, I did not know that, thanks for the info Chris

[Markonian]

Patrick O'Brien wrote:

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Cool, I did not know that, thanks for the info Chris

I didn't know that, either. Good to know now, so I'll can read it in advance. Immortal Coil was actually the first Star Trek novel I ever read. I remember being underwhelmed by it, so I didn't pick up reading ST again until Cross-Cult started ST:VGD in 2008.