2018 Releases

Apparently it has been contracted so it will appear at some stage whatever happens.

As to when?

Let’s just say I’m not holding my breath.

 

Based on how long it's taken her to write in the past, if she's at full speed the earliest we'd see it is December, and with Disco that seems like an unreasonable expectation.

 

Even if Pocket does lose the contract and stops publishing their books, you should still have access to the ones you've already bought.
There are several digital comics I bought on Comixology that have been pulled from the store but I still have access to them.

 

Bantam also continued to publish its Star Wars novels after they lost the license to Del Rey, but I noticed in the bookstore the other day that all the old Bantam books are being reprinted by Del Rey these days; I think the dates inside coincided with the Disney purchase / transition to "Legends" status for EU material.

When Dark Horses's Star Wars license expired and it went to Marvel, DH couldn't reprint anymore and now Marvel reprints the old DH material.

 

Hmm. It's interesting that Pocket never got reprint rights to the Bantam or Ballantine Trek books. Although they did get the reprint rights to Mission to Horatius.

 

I do wonder why Pocket hasn't elected to at least reprint some older, out-of-print stuff, or compilations of ebooks. It'd at least give them the ability to keep product on the shelves.

 

Del Rey and Bantam Spectra are both Penguin Random House imprints, though. (Bantam Doubleday Dell was bought by Random House shortly before the license transition.) That seems to me like it's just corporate finally cleaning up house; if you have to make changes to the cover for the reprint anyway, you might as well finally dump the defunct imprint for the current one.

I suspect that the typical licensing terms are just different for comics versus novels. You often see comic publishers reprinting old material (Dark Horse did it with the old Marvel Star Wars and Halo stuff; Titan's doing it with the IDW Doctor Who material; IDW did it with the DC Star Trek material).

Conversely, in addition to the Ballantine Trek reprints mentioned above, Del Rey kept reprinting their Star Wars stuff during the Bantam Spectra era (pre-merger). And heck, a few years ago Baen finally released their Wing Commander tie-ins as ebooks.

I can only think of one case where the old prose publisher lost their rights: the Del Rey Halo novels went to Tor. And even then, it didn't repeat when the license went from Tor to Simon & Schuster; Tor's still printing their old titles.

(There's also some potentially ambiguous cases: iBooks reprinting the old Battlestar Galactica novelizations, Titan reprinting Independence Day and Planet of the Apes tie-ins. Not enough info to know whether the old publisher still had the rights & just didn't think there was money in them, or if they had lost the rights entirely.)

 

Bantam and Del Rey are part of the same company now. The leather bound “Star Trek Classic Episodes” book from a couple years back reprinting Blish adaptations, which were all published by Bantam, has the Del Rey logo on the title page. Maybe Del Rey is the Penguin Random House imprint for SF tie-ins, no matter where they originated.

ETA: and, Timson beat me to it...

 

Pocket may not have had any interest in reprinting Marshak & Culbreath, Sky, or the rest. Pocket in the early days was quite adept at publishing Star Trek books that were lacking (in and around some absolute classics.) They may have seen little upside in acquiring reprint rights to another publisher’s mediocre backlist.

 

I assume I knew this at some point and forgot. Thanks.

Virgin couldn't reprint Doctor Who titles when the BBC took the license in-house (hence copies of the later New Adventures are rarer, since they never went into second printings), but of course the rules around Doctor Who tie-ins were quite different during the wilderness years.

 

That's a little unfair. Bantam had some strong entries like Planet of Judgment and The Galactic Whirlpool, and somewhat notable ones like Spock Must Die! and World Without End.

It's not unheard of for a publisher to be selective about which older books it reprints. Del Rey reprinted the two Dell Babylon 5 novels that were considered canonical, but as far as I know, they didn't reprint the others.

 

With Horatius, as John Ordover wrote in Pocket’s intro to the book, Whitman no longer existed, so Paramount held all the rights including reprint rights. So there was no need to buy out Whitman’s rights, it just needed to be licensed from Paramount.

Whereas the Bantam and Ballantine books I would assume that they have some clause that allows them to go on reprinting in perpetuity.

 

I can’t say it will go exactly the same, but when Dark Horse Comics Lost their Star Wars license, they lost the ability to sell the books but all the books I’ve bought through their digital app remain there for me to download when I want, so I didn’t lose anything. I think all publishers benefit by having customers feel confident in digital purchases.

 

Well, I’ve re-read all the Bantam novels in the last 6 months or so, and you named every single one worth remembering. IMHO, of course.

And regarding the B5 novels that were reprinted by Del Rey — by that time, Dell and Del Rey had the same parent, so there was no need to renegotiate licenses. And, iirc, the two books were reprinted at the request of Joe Straczynski.

 

And as you mentioned, the number of Pocket novels worth remembering in the first couple of years wasn't that much greater.

I wasn't talking about who owned the license. As I stated already, I was merely making the point that reprinting some books does not require reprinting all of them.

 

Just finished reading The Prometheus Design myself.

Out of the 182 or so books I have read so far (I keep a detailed list) it is by far the worst. Not even close.
Story all over the place, characters totally out of character and super boring.
Had to force myself to finish it.

 

Definitely.

I have plenty of books to keep me busy for a good couple of years if not more.
Over 400 with 182 read - so plenty to go. And still buying more whenever I can.

 

Speaking of the Bantam novels, I seriously entertained the idea that Benedict Cumberbatch would be playing Black Omne (from the Phoenix novels) when there was all the secrecy around his character in Star Trek: Into Darkness pre-release.

 

Choosing not to read into the slash components of those books, I enjoyed the rest of the story overall. Engaging story and tried tackling a couple big issues. I enjoyed all of the old stuff (give or take); able to just have fun with it, I guess. Definitely some really weird/out there stuff in the older portion of the catalog, though! Almost always at least a few redeeming qualities in even the crappiest of them, though. Except maybe The Prometheus Design, that one WAS pretty terrible. Although even there, is that the first time we got the swimming pool on the Enterprise?

 

I think TMP tried to make it look like there was a pond in the arboretum.