Re: TNG: The Stuff of Dreams by James Swallow Review Thread (Spoilers!
I picked this up on a bit of a whim (still not properly caught up with the TNG continuity, though I had already cheated and read the Cold Equations trilogy recently) because I needed a break from long hours this week and enjoyed it quite a bit. It's a good story, well-paced and with the right amount of meat on its bones.
I might sound like a broken record at this point, but it makes my desire for an on-going novella series much like SCE (or even a resurrection of SCE) flare up once again. Bite-sized stories one can easily get through in a single sitting (no, I can't do that with a novel: I don't have the time) are really satisfying from time to time, and the length constraint can add fuel to the creative fire - it basically forces writers to hone in on a particular hook or idea and try to do it justice, which meshes well with the genre and franchise I think.
It's why I buy short story collections now and then (for example Paolo Bacigalupi's Pump Six and Other Stories), to have that option. It's money that could go to the Trek line, some of it anyway ... i.e. the economical argument is that people's consumption behavior varies with their moods or what's going on in their lives, and the franchise could keep them company through more of it by appearing in more forms.
