Do you mean Knight Life?
The Best of Peter David
- Thread starter Arpy
- Start date
Do you mean Knight Life?
I think we are in complete agreement.
That the one where during a fight, Worf uses the transporter to
beam a guy’s head off?
Worf's First Adventure
Yep! That is the correct title, yes.
I've been rereading some of David's work in light of his passing. I was reading "I,Q" (co-written by the man himself) when I ran across this complete non sequitur. Speaking of Jadzia Dax, he says: "She was quite a woman. I wonder if she shaved. Maybe at a more quiet time I'd get a chance to ask her." (p150 hardcover edition) What? Is it just me or does that seem really weird? Is this perhaps some inside joke?
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Just good old fashioned sexism. Q is saying Dax is so manly, she might grow facial hair.
Of PAD's non-Trek work, I love Knight Life and the Swamp Thing novelisation, but I adore Howling Mad (about a wolf, bitten by a wereworf, who turns into a man at full moon) and his novelisation of the Ang Lee Hulk film, which comes off almost as a horror novel and was really well done.
I liked almost all of his Trek stuff, but my favourites are Imzadi, Q-In-Law and A Rock and a Hard Place. The Rift was also great.
I liked almost all of his Trek stuff, but my favourites are Imzadi, Q-In-Law and A Rock and a Hard Place. The Rift was also great.
Howling Mad, Knightlife, Sir Apropos of Nothing. All great stuff. I saw a listing for a book about the daughter of Robin Hood that he wrote before he passed that I am now even more eager to pick up and read than I was before.
A quick Google search tells me that the book is called Robyne of Sherwood, and I will make it my mission to find this book.
A quick Google search tells me that the book is called Robyne of Sherwood, and I will make it my mission to find this book.
I enjoyed Robyne, but it felt very much like Act 1 of a longer, Apropos-sized book (something I also noticed in the final Apropos book, where there was literally a moment where the narration noted that he'd reached the part where there'd be some wacky episodic adventures that would end up tying in with or reflecting thematically upon on the main plot, but Apropos/PAD was tired and preferred to cut to the chase). I don't begrudge PAD either novel under the circumstances (especially since, teasing a final epic conclusion aside, Pyramid Schemes resolved some foreshadowing from the first book that apparently I and I alone had been waiting to see paid off for a good number of years), and they're way more complete than, say, The Salmon of Doubt, four chapters of a novel Douglas Adams was intending to switch from magical-realism contemporary detective story to far-out space-opera sci-fi and so are totally unrepresentative of what he might've completed in a kinder world.
Thanks to various anthology Kickstarter bonus gifts, I also have two or three more obscure PAD titles waiting for me (his memoir, the Artful Dodger book, and I thought I had his Peter Pan book, but I don't see it on my shelf). I also saw there was a second edition of Writing For Comics, I'll have to grab that at some point, if only in hopes for another bit of gossip as tasty as "I came up with the idea of Magneto ripping out Wolverine's bones, but I didn't think anyone would actually do it."
Yes, I enjoyed it very much, especially because it provides a (Richard Arnold-foiling) conclusion to PAD's movie-era TOS comics. And Ambassador Kobry (formerly known as Moron, formerly known as Bernie).
In recent years, Peter wrote a bunch of nifty short stories, including his contributions to the Phenomenons shared-world superhero anthology series (2022-2024) created by Michael Jan Friedman, featuring Professor Paracelsus, a character who may or may not be a superhero; a bizarrely prescient story for the 2016 alternate-history anthology Altered States of the Union; a gleefully batshit story for Michael A. Ventrella's Three Time Travelers Walk Into... (2022) that put Ali Baba, Don Quixote, and Mephistopheles together; and one near and dear to my heart, "A Priest, a Rabbi, a Shinshoku, and an Imam Walk Into..." for The Four ???? of the Apocalypse (2023), which my wife Wrenn Simms and I edited, and which was a nasty bit of social commentary.
Also not to be forgotten are the two anthologies he and his wife Kathleen O. David edited in recent times: They Keep Killing Glenn, in which several authors wrote stories in which fellow author Glenn Hauman dies; and The Fans Are Buried Tales, a fannish riff on The Canterbury Tales, with cosplayers telling stories in character as whatever they're cosplaying as.
Also not to be forgotten are the two anthologies he and his wife Kathleen O. David edited in recent times: They Keep Killing Glenn, in which several authors wrote stories in which fellow author Glenn Hauman dies; and The Fans Are Buried Tales, a fannish riff on The Canterbury Tales, with cosplayers telling stories in character as whatever they're cosplaying as.
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