So What Are you Reading?: Generations

[JD]

I decided to take a break from Justice and I started ST: VOY: Into the Queue by Christie Golden, the conclusion to her Gateways story. It's one of the novellas in the last Gateways book, What Lays Beyond, which basically contains novellas that finish up the stories of each of the other books in the series. The whole way that miniseries was set up was so weird.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Paradise Lost

 

[indianatrekker26]

i'm finally tackling the TOS: Legacies trilogy. Im currently on Captain to Captain, and really enjoying it so far.

 

[Stephen!]

I finished the last few chapters of "Star Wars: Master and Apprentice", which I've been reading on and off since last year. I'm currently reading the last few chapters of "Indistinguishable from Magic", which I started reading quite a while ago and hadn't finished.

 

[Daddy Todd]

Scalzi’s The Last Emperox, which dropped Tuesday. Wil Wheaton’s audiobook reading is really good. The book itself is also very good.

 

[Reanok]

Star Trek Tos The Vulcan academy murders by Jean Lorrah

 

[KRAD]

I decided to take a break from Justice and I started ST: VOY: Into the Queue by Christie Golden, the conclusion to her Gateways story. It's one of the novellas in the last Gateways book, What Lays Beyond, which basically contains novellas that finish up the stories of each of the other books in the series. The whole way that miniseries was set up was so weird.

There was a severe lack of editorial direction there. We wound up with two different approaches by the six authors.

Susan Wright, Peter David, and I all did separate stories focusing on the captain characters. One Small Step, Cold Wars, and Demons of Air and Darkness all came to a conclusion, and then "One Giant Leap," "Death After Life," and "Horn and Ivory" were separate novellas that specifically followed Kirk, Calhoun & Shelby, and Kira. I don't know about Peter or Susan, but I actually wrote "H&I" several months after I finished DOAAD.

However, Diane Carey, Christie Golden, and Robert Greenberger all just lopped the last few chapters off Chainmail, No Man's Land, and Doors Into Chaos.

I think it would've been better if we all took the same approach that Susan, Peter, and I did, with the exception of Bob, who was tasked with bringing the whole storyline to a conclusion in "The Other Side."

 

[Bryan Levy]

I just finished Probe, and am reading Sanctuary by John Ordover. Probe is obviously a well known mess, and I felt that way reading it. Sanctuary is fine, a riff on Return of the Archons, but it’s sexual identity politics are a bit off in 2020 when it comes to the eunuch Senites.

 

[KRAD]

John Vornholt wrote Sanctuary, not John Ordover.

 

[Bryan Levy]

John Vornholt wrote Sanctuary, not John Ordover.

Oh, the embarrassment. That’s what I get for posting at work.

 

[JD]

There was a severe lack of editorial direction there. We wound up with two different approaches by the six authors.

Susan Wright, Peter David, and I all did separate stories focusing on the captain characters. One Small Step, Cold Wars, and Demons of Air and Darkness all came to a conclusion, and then "One Giant Leap," "Death After Life," and "Horn and Ivory" were separate novellas that specifically followed Kirk, Calhoun & Shelby, and Kira. I don't know about Peter or Susan, but I actually wrote "H&I" several months after I finished DOAAD.

However, Diane Carey, Christie Golden, and Robert Greenberger all just lopped the last few chapters off Chainmail, No Man's Land, and Doors Into Chaos.

I think it would've been better if we all took the same approach that Susan, Peter, and I did, with the exception of Bob, who was tasked with bringing the whole storyline to a conclusion in "The Other Side."

Yeah, it's pretty clear with the way Into the Queue just jumps right in that it was pretty much jumps right in that it was literally the end of No Man's Land. I'm kind of regretting taking a break before starting it.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

August Derleth's In Re: Sherlock Holmes, i.e, The Adventures of Solar Pons, the first collection of Solar Pons stories by Derleth, the Sage of Sauk City.

Solar Pons is... Well, fundamentally, he's a Sherlock Holmes knock-off in the interwar period. Derleth, as a teenager, wrote to Doyle, asked if Doyle (deep into his Spirituality phase) planned to write more Sherlock Holmes stories. Doyle replied in the negative. Derleth wrote to Doyle and asked if he could write more Sherlock Holmes stories if Doyle would not, and Doyle again wrote and replied in the negative. So Derleth decided to write his own Sherlock Holmes-like stories, wrote on his calendar on a certain date "In Re: Sherlock Holmes," and when that date came he sat down and wrote his first Solar Pons story ("The Adventure of the Black Narcissus"). He wrote a few more, went into writing his Sac Prairie Saga (a regional fiction set in a fictional Wisconsin town, much as Faulkner's fiction revolves around a fictional Mississippi locale) and publishing Lovecraft, and returned to Pons in the 1940s when Ellery Queen commissioned a Solar Pons story for The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes ("The Adventure of the Norcross Riddle"). Reinspired, Derleth began writing more Solar Pons stories and published a collection of a dozen of them, In Re: Sherlock Holmes, named for that note he scribbled on his calendar, and eventually would publish about seventy over the next quarter century.

In spite of their origins, these stories have their own charm and stand on their own. Pons has his Watson-like chronicler, Dr. Lyndon Parker, a long-suffering landlady, and a frequent visitor from Scotland Yard in need of assistance. The stories are small scale affairs -- a young woman believes her uncle is being haunted, a professor walks into his house and vanishes, a young man's lucky medallion is stolen, a novelist witnesses an accident and while he's giving a statement his house is broken into and the furniture in his attic inspected -- but they're also nice puzzle stories. Pons expects Parker to be able to work these puzzles out on his own, and some of them, if you're attentive enough, you can. (I tend to think that with most of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, the reader is not supposed to be able to work it out.) As similar as they are -- from habits to attire -- Pons feels sufficiently different than Holmes to be interesting in his own right.

I think my favorite in the collection is "The Adventure of the Purloined Periapt," the story of the young man and the lucky medallion. It was the inheritance from an uncle, and it was stolen from his dresser when he was in the bath. As insignificant as this seems, Pons takes the case, he requires the services of the Praed Street Irregulars, and the resolution has a touch of the theatrical. Like I said, it's just charming.

 

[Christopher]

a professor walks into his house and vanishes

Isn't that one of the unsolved cases Watson mentioned in one of the later Holmes stories?

[goes off to research]

Ah, yes, from "The Problem of Thor Bridge": "Among these unfinished tales is that of Mr James Phillimore, who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world."

I'm curious about what Pons's solution to the problem was.

(I tend to think that with most of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, the reader is not supposed to be able to work it out.)

Holmes often complained to Watson of his tendency to conceal crucial facts that would make the solution clear. Although as Watson (Doyle) wrote it, it was more often Holmes who kept coy about his solutions so he could spring them at the most dramatic possible moment and amaze everyone (what a ham).

Still, there were some I was able to figure out in advance. The aforementioned "Thor Bridge" is one, though I think I had a vague memory of seeing it adapted. As I mentioned, The Valley of Fear was quite easy to figure out because practically all the clues were overtly telegraphed. And I was way ahead of Holmes in figuring out "The Lion's Mane," even though that was from his own perspective and we saw his thought process from the inside. But then, that comes down to already being aware of a natural phenomenon that he was less familiar with, so I was able to recognize the clues.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Isn't that one of the unsolved cases Watson mentioned in one of the later Holmes stories?

[goes off to research]

Ah, yes, from "The Problem of Thor Bridge": "Among these unfinished tales is that of Mr James Phillimore, who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world."

I'm curious about what Pons's solution to the problem was.

Yes, as I understand it, a number of Pons' cases riff on some of Watson's unchronicled cases. In this case...

Spoiler

The witness to the disappearance was the disappeared man himself. He created an assumed identity -- in this case, of a real person, a professor, in Germany -- and made sure his assumed identity was seen for several days, even had a hotel room, so that no one would believe the assumed identity was not a real person, and when it came time for his real identity to disappear, he, in his assumed identity, reported the disappearance to a passing constable. What he hadn't planned on was that his assumed identity was then held as a material witness to a possible crime; he had intended to report the crime, catch a train to Dover, and flee to the Continent with embezzled funds. It was clever, and I figured it out before Parker had it explained to him, but I was surprised that no one except Pons had seen through the assumed identity's disguise.

Christopher, if you're interested, the Hounds of the Internet, a Sherlock Holmes email discussion list that's been running for a quarter century, is restarting on their weekly reread/discussion of the Canon, just now cycling back to A Study in Scarlet.

 

[Daddy Todd]

Finished The Last Emperox last night. It was a great finale to a great trilogy, with nice “hooks” at the end for What Comes Next, whenever Scalzi gets around to writing it.

Highly recommended.

 

[John Clark]

Finished The Last Emperox last night. It was a great finale to a great trilogy, with nice “hooks” at the end for What Comes Next, whenever Scalzi gets around to writing it.

Highly recommended.

Hadn't realised that was out yet and I enjoyed the previous two

 

[Cyfa]

I've just finished A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. It was slow going as I was concentrating hard in order to understand everything, and then I got just past the "Trousers of Time", or thereabouts, and it stuck its tongue out at me () and left me for dust! I still finished it, though - mainly due to Hawking's engaging (and humourous) writing style.
Now I've got to choose between Stephen Fry's Heroes and Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy (both gifts). Or I might just save my brain and read some Calvin and Hobbes

 

[Reanok]

I'm reading Star Trek Utterly the stars by Dean Alan Foster

 

[Christopher]

My latest library e-book acquisition is Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes (La Planète des singes). I've always heard how different it was from the movie, so I wanted to see just how much had changed. To my surprise, it's actually much closer to the movie's story than I thought. The movie's changes are more along the lines of streamlining and rearranging the concepts than completely replacing them. The names of the main character and his fellow astronauts are changed, but their actions and fates are pretty similar, and Zira, Cornelius, Zaius, and Nova are all there and quite recognizable, though both male apes have smaller roles in the book. Most of the book has pretty much the same story structure as the film, diverging more in the last third or so, but having a lot of the same ideas and themes throughout, though the satire feels more Swiftian than Serlingesque.

The main differences include:

Spoiler: Planet of the Apes book & film

It's unambiguously a different planet in the book, in orbit of Betelgeuse and named Soror (sister in Latin) by the lead character, and its technology is at a 20th-century level. The lead character, Merou, actually succeeds in convincing the ape society of his sentience and personhood, and much of the last third of the book seems to have been the inspiration for Escape from the PotA, except with the species inverted. Far from hating the damn dirty apes, Merou reacts more like Gulliver among the Houyhnhnm, developing great admiration for the apes and a degree of contempt for humanity, though he's not happy with the apes' medical experiments on humans. Zira is only engaged to Cornelius, and her relationship with Merou is much more of a romance, though they stop short of consummating it, with Zira uttering her familiar line about the man being too ugly.

There's a very clumsy plot device (involving racial memory) by which the truth is discovered that Soror's ape civilization arose from the collapse of its previous human civilization, and the descriptions of how it happened are reminiscent of both the later films in the original series and the first couple of films in the modern series. In the end, the surprise twist is that Merou gets back to Earth after centuries of time-dilated flight to find that it too has been taken over by apes (which was pretty much telegraphed by the opening frame sequence). I can understand why the movie streamlined this by just having it be Earth all along.

 

[Reanok]

Star Trek online The needs of the many by Micheal A.Martin