Um, I'm proud to be part of that POTA anthology, and it got very good reviews, but, honestly, it didn't sell well enough to justify a second volume. It may have been "highly successful" in terms of reader response, but I don't believe it was a big seller. More's the pity.
Again, this has nothing to do with the quality of the projects, or the artistic merits of short fiction versus longer forms. Just talking sales figures here.
Because each new book notification, and each new review, appear as links at right, under the heading "Trek Today News".
M
marlboro
Guest
Good to know.
I've been a member here for years, and I never noticed a section for Trek news. I use my phone or Kindle to browse with and the links show up at the very bottom of the main page, instead of at the right. Since it's below the Ad-space I don't think I've ever scrolled down that far!
I'm kind of worried about what else I've missed. Maybe a line in the Ferengi print where I agree to sell my organs to the Vidiians as a condition of my being allowed to post here or something.
I had Marco autograph that story at Shore Leave in either 2002 or 2003, and let's just say there was... a lot of gurning on Marco's part.
This is a great idea, and not only would I be up for doing a story for it, it'd also be a terrific way to throw open the doors and get some new voices into the mix. But as m'colleague Greg notes, anthos are always a tough sell.
I'm still annoyed that we didn't get a 10th anniversary anthology in 2011, and I doubt we'll get a 20th next year.
Keith is right that DOMINION WAR is the little anthology that could. Get a royalty check like clockwork, every six months.
Use https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Upcoming_productions
and then go back through each year date:
eg. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/2020_(production)
and https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/2019_(production)
and https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/2018_(production) etc.
M
marlboro
Guest
Cool. Thanks!
Edited to add: Shards and Shadows is another great Trek anthology, imo. Almost all of the Mirror Universe books are great. Much better than many of the tv MU stories.
Edited to add: Shards and Shadows is another great Trek anthology, imo. Almost all of the Mirror Universe books are great. Much better than many of the tv MU stories.
Yes, that's okay - it's a small enough topic really that general discussion isn't going to overwhelm Star Trek discussion.
For we literary Doctor Who fans anthologies are nary a problem. In fact we are well served by anthologies with several short story collections being published every year. The BBC also seems to operate a fairly good 'hands off' approach to fan anthologies and fan literature in general. This doesn't really happen with Trek though.
Given how much Trek we have available across multiple licensees, a cross-licensee effort might garner some sales. Something like a Strange New Worlds anthology tie-in to the new series that had a Star Trek Online tie-in story, a Star Trek Adventures RPG tie-in story, Star Trek Timelines tie-in, veteran Star Trek novelists, and a couple new voices. It'd take some coordination and a Good Idea, but it could be done if the right people put in the elbow grease to make it happen and if they could convince the corporate bean counters to do it.
I was really hoping when IDW did the New Frontier and Myriad Universes comics that would be the start of a lot more collaboration between, and I was disappointed it never went beyond those two series. The closest we've gotten since then was the cameo by Titan, Riker, Vale, and Tuvok in TNG: Hive, but that wasn't consistent with the novels, so it doesn't really count for me.
Doctor Who seems to work great in short story format. Even before the new series started, there were quite a few, including those very strange annual stories. I thought I remembered thinking when the new series was coming, and people were complaining that 45 minute episodes wouldn't work for DW, I thought about how many DW short stories I had read that were very enjoyable. DW and Star Trek work great in their earlier incarnations as anthology shows with regular, semi-static characters that were familiar to the audience. Anthology shows like Twilight Zone or Amazing Stories were great, too, but DW and Star Trek have characters and situations that provide an anchor to ease into a new story.
There's an interesting irony in how some of my reading choices have led to me to anthologies that still surprise me. When I was much younger, I was dismissive of Conan, because I was wary of the aesthetic. I called it "Barbarian Fantasy" and I didn't think it would resemble the types of Dungeons and Dragons stories I wanted to read. I liked reading Doctor Who novels during the wilderness years between shows, and those novels lead me to the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft got me a step closer to Robert E. Howard. It was someones joking speculation that Robert E. Howard's Conan stories might be something of a shared universe with Lovecraft's monsters that got me to try the Conan stories; which I continued to read because they were great short reads for epic fantasy. It's funny to oversimplify the idea; that the more intellectual reading of DW led me to read the stories of Conan, who I once thought was a "brainless" barbarian.
In the same vein of wanted shorter fiction to get a fix, I am happy that Stephen King has written so many works of such drastically different lengths. I enjoy his writing a lot, I recently discovered, and it's nice to have short fiction to read when his longer novels might seem daunted at a given time.
One thing that I really like about the ST Adventures RPG is it has a hook that I find surprisingly tantalizing. It has this default setting at the height of ST's popularity in the Next Generation era. The Enterprise has been destroyed over Veridian III, there is unrest between the Federation and Cardassia, the Maquis are complicating the matter, and another vessel, Voyager, has mysteriously disappeared. And within this backdrop is the tagline challenge "Starfleet needs a new crew." It's such a simple, elegant idea. I don't know if an anthology that takes inspiration from that would be successful, but I would go for it.
"The Captain's Table" anthology...
When Acting Captain Saru and (former Pretend Terran Captain) Tilly transported into the saloon in Episode #2, I thought they'd found "The Captain's Table" of the novelverse.
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