The Past Decade of Trek Lit

Captain Hernandez was seen on Enterprise, but the rest of the Columbia crew is original to the novels.

 

If you haven't taken a look at it already, I would highly recommend The Buried Age, by Christopher L. Bennett. It covers the story of Jean-Luc Picard after the loss of the Stargazer and before his taking command of the Enterprise-D.

It works well as a standalone volume in its own right, and also includes some handy glimpses at how the Federation stood in the immediate pre-TNG time period.


Another standalone book I'd suggest considering is Burning Dreams, by Margaret Wander Bonanno. If you have an interest in the novelverse version of Christopher Pike (Jeffrey Hunter's Pike, not Bruce Greenwood's Pike), it's hard to beat.



Oh, and while Vanguard has helped to make things interesting in the 23rd century, things have not been idle for the 22nd. A series of post-ENT books have reached the periods before, during, and after the Earth-Romulan War; and a new "Rise of the Federation" series has recently been launched which looks at the early days of the novelverse version of the UFP.

 

I only just re-read Burning Dreams last week, it is really good.

 

I would be interested to read those ENT Romulan War books.... assuming they were any good

 

I haven't gotten around to the Romulan War books yet, but the I loved the earlier books with Mangles and Martin.

 

Well...not nearly as good as what comes next in the Rise of The Federation, by Christopher L. Bennett. The first book, A Choice of Futures, was fantastic. The second book, Tower of Babel, is set to come out at the end of March.

Speaking of the second ROTF book...anyone seen a cover yet?

 

I've only seen a concept "sketch" myself.

 

I apologize. From the way you talked, I thought you meant that you'd finished Book I.

Suffice it to say that there's plenty of grit and pathos in Destiny -- and that complaining about everyone lacking grit was an extremely premature comment.

An Alonis, presumably. (They're David R. George III's creation, first appearing, IIRC, in his novel Mission: Gamma - Twilight, and he seems to enjoy including them when possible.) The Alonis, of course, are only "disabled" in Class-M environments; Humans just as "disabled" when they visit the Alonis homeworld (or when they visit the underwater civilization of Pacifica). In other words, the "disability" is relative.

That's just a normal biological process for her species, no different from a Human going on maternity/paternity leave, or from a Vulcan returning to his homeworld for pon farr.

Yeah, Melora. She first appeared in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

 

Like Sci said, none of the aliens who you've talked about are actually disabled, their conditions are all perfectly normal for their species. I don't think any of that comes from trying to be "PC", they're just trying to give us aliens who aren't your standard humanoids like we've been getting on TV and in movies for almost 50 years.

 

Well, by the same token, most of what's called "PC" by some people is just an effort to include types of human being who have been ignored or marginalized by TV and movies in the past. In both cases, it's got nothing to do with being "political," just with trying to represent a diverse population more realistically.

 

But that is a political agenda -- it's an egalitarian political agenda, because it is based on the idea that people should be seen as equals rather than marginalized, oppressed, or ignored. Deciding you want to do a TV show that features, for instances, black people or LGBT people, is an inherently political act when the culture at large is still built on white supremacy and heterosexism.

To digress some more, I do agree thought that it's silly to use the term "P.C." or "political correctness" to refer to an egalitarian political agenda. The idea of "political correctness" is a concept that holds that any thought that contradicts the "accepted" political ideology is bad and should be censored, and so the idea of "political correctness" realistically shouldn't be seen as applying to any one ideology. It is "politically incorrect" for someone to, for instance, advocate for Socialism in a Capitalist America. "P.C.," if understood realistically, is a phenomenon that is not restricted to the left or the right; it is a phenomenon that appears any time advocates of a particular politics want to restrict thoughts that don't adhere to their dogmas.

 

I seemed to have enjoyed the Romulan War duology rather more than the rest of the posters here, but it did suffer from being cut down from a trilogy.

Christopher's Enterprise novels do show a huge amount of promise though - I can't wait for the next one. Fingers crossed he gets the go ahead for more in a Vanguardish sort of series...

 

Ditto I also liked the Enterprise Romulan war novels It would've been interesting to find out what the missing story would 've turned out for the different Enterprise characters especially their storyarcs to complete the Romulan war books If it hadn't been canceled..I'm also looking forward to reading Tower of Babel next year.

 

The way I took it books 2 and 3 were just compressed into book 2.

 

Do these two books tell a complete story or is it left hanging and never resolved?

 

They tell a complete story, covering the entire span of the war and the founding of the Federation, though To Brave the Storm condenses the plots of the planned second and third volumes into one, so it probably skims over a lot of stuff that would've been covered in more depth at trilogy length.

 

I've edited your post, just in case anyone else comes in who hasn't read recent Trek.

Can everyone please be very careful in this thread with spoilers - since this is a thread specifically about someone who hasn't read the recent books.

 

Maybe it's time to create that sticky thread to remind everyone of the spoiler guidelines now-a-days.