http://www.licensemag.com/licensema...Article/detail/776316?contextCategoryId=33594 "Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, will continue its successful partnership with CCP [CBS Consumer Products] for Star Trek novels in print and electronic formats. Under the renewal agreement, Pocket Books will produce original novels across all Star Trek series. Over the past 33 years, Simon & Schuster has published close to 1,000 Star Trek titles." Also info in the above link re new publishing deals (and example upcoming titles) for Abrams Publishing, becker&mayer! and Cider Mill Press.
Really? I am quite pleased with this news. S&S/Pocket Books has built up an incredibly detailed, intricate, continuous extended Trek universe. I'd hate for all of that to get scrapped because a new publisher decides to ignore everything that's come before.
Yeah, I've been less than thrilled with the post-Nemesis books for quite a while now. Even the Voyager re-re-launch fell flat for me pretty quickly, I never made it through Children of the Storm and can't remember the last TNG (including Titan), DS9 or ENT book I actually made it through. I bought Plagues of Night got a couple chapters in and was soooo bored.
Well, as various folks suggested on this board the last time the subject of a license change came up, it's possible that if the license changed hands, the new publisher might continue the existing continuity. The Doctor Who novels from BBC Books initially disregarded the Virgin novels' continuity, but then started incorporating it. The Del Rey Babylon 5 novels included references to events from a couple of the Dell B5 novels. And all the Star Wars tie-ins from different publishers are supposed to stay consistent with each other. Of course, it's also possible that they would prefer to start a new continuity, or tie into Star Trek Online, or maybe only have the license to do Abramsverse fiction, or something. So it's just as well we don't have to worry about that for now. Post-NEM books and ENT books aren't the entirety of what Pocket publishes. There's also been a lot of TOS-era stuff in recent years.
Try sticking with a book to the end. Sometimes they start off slow with the setup, but pay off in the end. Did you try the Destiny trilogy by David Mack? I found those quite awesome.
Perhaps, BillJ, you don't remember what things were like back in the Bantam days: at one point, literally every other novel was a new variation on the tired old "Kirk and the Enterprise Crew stick their noses into someplace they don't belong, and run afoul of some superbeing," the books seemingly competing with each other only to see which would be the worst.
Not the Bantam days, but I remember early in Pocket's run. When stories were well paced and not every novel needed to be a hundred-thousand words to tell a story. I liked the days when the regular novels were 275-325 pages and then for big stories you had the 'Giant' novels.
I'm the complete opposite there, I actually prefer longer books if I'm given the choice. Not saying that good books can't be short, right now I'm reading the Dead to the World e-book, which is only 245 pages and I'm really enjoying it. I just prefer them to be longer.
.... I'm sorry, but it sounds to me like you're asking for novels to be written on a high school reading level. There's no reason to spend the same amount for less story.
The only reason I'd even entertain the idea of Pocket losing the Star Trek License would be for Marco to end up back in the saddle, large-and-in-charge of the creating the continuing voyages of... A dream perhaps, but enjoyable to contemplate none the less.
Hey, hold on. Lots of great books are of moderate length. The Final Reflection is 253 pages. The Wounded Sky is 255. Yesterday's Son is 191. How much worth you get from a book is about a lot more than how many pages it has. Some stories are better at a shorter length. For that matter, reading level isn't a function of word count either. The Harry Potter books are on a high-school reading level, but three of them are more than 700 pages long.