Last night I started reading ST: SCE: Cold Fusion by @KRAD. This is my second time reading this one, but I don't remember anything at all about it, so it's almost like I've never read it.
I'm reading The Enterprise War and The Higher Frontier. In both stories, the antagonist is a group of multiple species that is happy to recruit opponents to their side. There are some differences, of course, but I thought it was a fun coincidence. They also superficially remind me of the Breen, another group of multiple species working together and looking the same.
Just finished re-reading E. Power Biggs: Concert Organist. Awaiting Lisa Borden's The Alphabet of Avoidance (which is the apparent original source of a rather pithy quote I've been using of late) and Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (along with the Short Treks DVD) from B&N. What exactly is Pulling Up Stakes?
I was kind of leaning that direction myself. And thinking of the staking scene (complete with what TVTropes calls "enforced Method Acting") from Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
Almost finished " homicide: a year on the killing streets". Wow hard is really hard in Baltimore. Next book is going to be Star Trek: Mere anarchy. I have more than a hundred Star Trek novels, but this is going to be my first TOS novel set during the 5 year mission!
Mere Anarchy is a collection of six novellas each set during a different timeframe: pilot era, 5-year mission, pre-TMP, between TMP & TWOK, after TFF, and after TUC. It was an anniversary celebration meant to represent the whole span of the Kirk/Enterprise era.
Not much because I have read all the books at least twice. But serious why don't you read your books?
I do. But it takes time to get through that many. Two or three a month is the max I can normally do. Real life tends to get in the way sometimes.
Philip K. Dick: Essays of the Here and Now, a collection of academic essays and symposium transcripts edited by David Sandner. The week Diamond's offices closed up due to COVID in March, someone left a couple of spiralbound ARCs of forthcoming books from McFarland Publishing on the lunchroom table. I feel like one of them was about Star Trek: Voyager, which I looked at briefly then put back for someone else, but the one that really piqued my interest was this book on Philip K. Dick. I picked it up, shoved it in my briefcase, and it's been sitting on my living room table ever since. Until this weekend when I sat outside and read through it. The book divides pretty neatly in the middle. The first half is a series of essays on Dick's writings, mostly on themes in specific works, and the second half is transcripts of talks from a Philip K. Dick conference and interviews with Jonathan Lethem. (Lethem's early work, especially his first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, was heavily influenced by Dick, and he edited The Exegesis and the Library of America collection of Dick's work.) The essays touch on some interesting topics -- psychological bicameralism, connections between Dick's work and Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere. The essay on Teilhard makes some observations on Dick's canon and how it divides into three thematic eras that I'd never noticed before but made perfect sense. (I wan't aware that Dick viewed VALIS as a continuation of A Scanner Darkly and that Horselover Fat was Bob Arctor.) The transcripts in the second half of the book are unsatisfying in the way that a transcript of a panel from a science-fiction convention would be unsatisfying; the speakers are, in some cases, speaking off the cuff, so there's a lot that could be talked about but isn't, there are interesting things that get mentioned and never addressed at length, and there are time hogs who say a lot. Yes, Paul Sammon talking about the Blade Runner Final Cut is great, but I wanted him to say more about what Ridley Scott's original vision for Amazon Prime's The Man in the High Castle was and why the series wasn't that. It's not a book for everyone, but if essays about how awesome Galactic Pot Healer is interest you, it's probably worth checking out of a library and flipping through it until you see something that catches your interest. For myself, I feel like a bit like digging out my copies of The Exegesis (both Sutin's extracts and Lethem's longer extracts) and revisiting Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man.
I have a quick question on SCE: Cold Fusion. They keep talking about a previous run in with the Androssi, but I don't remember that from any of the other novellas. Was this covered in an earlier one I've forgotten about, was did happen offpage?