STAR TREK: PICARD - ROGUE ELEMENTS by John Jackson Miller

Haha...absolutely loved that scene. Still chuckling about it now as I type this.

Also, JJM, I picked up the new Marvel KOTOR Omnibus a few weeks ago too (the mass-market cover variant) -- just wanted to mention that I'm having a blast re-reading those tales again, and thrilled that Marvel is now reprinting all of these classic SW stories in the ultra-premium hardcover Omni-format, here.

 

Thanks! I couldn't be happier about that re-release — and I think the success of it demonstrates there's still a lot of life in those arcs and characters. I can hardly imagine what would make a better package for that material. (Slipcase? Annotations? Not much to add!)

What's interesting about modern publishing is that because we know who our customers are and we aren't as dependent on a buckshot approach to selling, we can not only ask, "What's the best possible format to put these time-tested stories in"; sometimes we can actually do it. (Which is why I'm also thrilled this Picard novel actually starts from that position, thanks to the hardcover.)

 

Absolutely! I first read the KOTOR comic series a few weeks ago and binged the whole thing within a few days. Amazing series and a highpoint of my chronological Star Wars read-through (so far).

 

It's pretty remarkable that characters and events from the Tales of the Jedi and KOTOR-eras have basically been getting recanonized on a rolling, ongoing basis, here, and it seems likely that Lucasfilm/Disney are fine with those stories remaining at least semi-canonical for the time being, since they don't appear to have any real plans for exploring that time period themselves (apart from an in-development KOTOR movie that Kathleen Kennedy announced awhile back).

Recently I got a huge kick out of seeing the Great Sith War brought back into canon in the first High Republic novel by Charles Soule (along with what was pretty clearly a reference a bit further down the page to the events of KOTOR II: The Sith Lords), and I don't doubt that we'll be seeing even more such re-canonizations in the future. (Just waiting for Zayne Carrick to finally get a mention in some upcoming story, now...)

 

Heh, Camper from KOTOR is definitely in — my story in the Empire Strikes Back From A Certain Point of View anthology from last fall notes that asteroids are rated for their propensity to have space slugs on something called the Vandrayk Scale. That doesn't mean that he lived when the comics said he did; it's just fun for those who recognize the name, and if anyone was the historical leader in slug research, it probably would have been him. Obviously, Thrawn — and what I did in Canto Bight with Mosep Binneed, a.k.a. the "Monkey Jabba" from Marvel's original series — is on a different level, but all those appearances (and the Vandrayk mention) were cleared with the Story Group.

My streaming-show era novels for Trek have similar elements — Enterprise War has a sizable role for the nurse from Early Voyages. Again, doesn't mean all those comics stories happened as told, but at least today's readers can say there was a Carlotti on the crew.

 

KOTOR is, in my opinion, the best ongoing Star Wars that Dark Horse ever did. I even got my wife (casual Star Wars fan, not a tie-in reader) to read it and she loved it too (big Jarael fan).

 

Gryph will always be my spirit-guide...

 

You need to upload it to a photo sharing site, and you get a link from that site, and then post the link in the box that pops up when you click the button with the picture of the mountains.

 

Hehe, yes, Gryph was my favorite.

 

If you liked Gryph, you’ll find his spiritual soulmate in this novel in the (similarly appropriately named) Ledger.

 

Surely this is the first Star Trek novel to cite Derrida in the acknowledgements?

 

Grrr. Amazon.co.uk was supposed to deliver the book to me next week, now it says 'arriving Sep 22'.

 

Arrived today. Should get to start it today

 

Treknews.net had a review of Rogue Elements they said it's a really good story for Rios. I'm looking forward to getting my book soon.

 

Picked it up yesterday. After finishing another non-ST blast-from-the-past (Robert Arthur's Ghosts and More Ghosts -- there have been times, this past year, when mailing myself to the Federated States of El Dorado seemed rather attractive), I began it late yesterday afternoon (I have the week off from work), and I'm now about 1/8 of the way into it.

Nice glimpse into the 24th century Iotian society. I really wish I were fluent enough in Runyonese to phrase this entire post in that dialect. As I recall, this is not the first time we've met post-"A Piece of the Action" Iotians in TrekLit.

 

Yes, the main Iotian TrekLit element was a character in the SCE stories. (I crafted my story in a way such that it didn't interfere.)

 

I'm glad to hear that the book is consistent with SCE's portrayal of Vinx and the Iotians retaining their "gangster" trappings. I prefer that to the practice seen in some comics and short stories of showing them having turned themselves into a Starfleet-duplicate culture as a result of McCoy's communicator being left behind. "A Piece of the Action"'s pretense of them as a culture of kneejerk imitators is bad sociology, a rehash of the racially condescending "cargo cult" myth. The reality is that cultures have their own agendas driving whether and how they adopt outside ideas. I think it's more likely that some Iotian subculture had values similar to those in The Book and exploited it as a tool to gain power and spread their beliefs, claiming that it proved their ways had the cachet of a higher power. The Horizon crew would've just reported it as "Aww, look at the imitative primitives" because they were traders rather than sociologists and didn't know any better.

And by a century later, those "gangster" values would've become so ingrained in the culture that they wouldn't be so easily expunged, certainly not without an incentive on the Iotians' part to make the change. Indeed, Kirk's decision to respect the Iotians' cultural norms and work within them to bring about reform would've most likely solidified them even further, giving the Iotian power structure an incentive to maintain the "boss" system and its associated cultural trappings, albeit in a less chaotic and exploitative way.

 

As you'll see, we delve quite a bit into these matters, including who they were before Horizon dropped by.

 

The international release of the physical books seems to be having some issues (I'm gonna take a wild guess and say probably pandemic-related ones), but I managed to get the audio book and ebook and am currently listening to it.
I'm really glad I was in my car for some of it, though, so nobody could hear how loud I was laughing and screaming about loving it

@JJMiller Can I just say THANK YOU for Cris Rios (not Chris!) and "The La is already a the"? Absolutely made my day!

 

Only a few chapters in. Not that interesting.