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Captains Table

Arpy

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I'm considering reading one of the Captains Table books. Of them all (including the Pike and Calhoun ones and the short story anthology) is any the stand-out best?
 
I'll second the vote for Calhoun's story, Once Burned. It was my first book for the New Frontier series at the time and an excellent starting point. Of the remaining original Captain's Table books, I've only read the Kirk/Sulu and Sisko ones. I expect I found the first quite average as I don't remember it much (oh dear), the second wasn't my cup of tea.
 
I actually really enjoyed the DS9 story and hated the Voyager one. I definitely agree that the Calhoun story was the best of the bunch, though.
 
I actually liked them all to varying degrees (well, except the TNG story) but Once Burned is clearly the best. The Voyager entry and David R. George III's Demora Sulu story in the collection are the other highlights.
 
I've only read the Pike novel, but I enjoyed it enough to track down a copy of my own a few months ago. (I missed the series when it first came out, and borrowed a friend's Where Sea Meets Sky.)
 
Once Burned is great, Where Sea Meets Sky is good fun, and I remember enjoying Fire Ship. The other three feel like forgettable adventures that just happen to be in the first person.
 
Once Burned is not only a great Star Trek book, it's a damn fine book period. Fire Ship is pretty good, too (and I'm not even a Voyager/Janeway fan). Stay far, far away from The Mist. One of the worst books I've ever read.
 
+1 on the Pike story. The Titan writers have obviously taken some inspiration from it.

If you're referring to the use of spacegoing lifeforms in Where Sea Meets Sky and Orion's Hounds, the former was actually a fairly minor influence on me in writing the latter. OH was actually expanded from a rejected Strange New Worlds submission I wrote years earlier, and drew on ideas I'd developed for my original fiction even earlier than that, back in college. I liked what Oltion did in WSMS, but he made a point of establishing that the space-whales there were artificially engineered, whereas I was more interested in exploring how spacegoing life forms could've evolved naturally.
 
Once Burned, Peter David's new frontier story is the standout of the set.

Where sea meets sky was also a lot of fun, I loved everything about the titans, and the stuff in the pub was actually good.

I would not have bought any of the others given the choice(got the omnibus).
 
Once Burned is one of the best New Frontier novels. I thought Fire Ship was -- let me be diplomatic here -- unenjoyable in any respect, but many good people of refined taste and discernment disagree. It just goes to show that only you can decide which books you'll like.
 
I've only read all of Once Burned and Tales from The Captain's Table (the anthology) and I really liked both of them. There are some less than great stories in the anthology, but I remember all of them being at least mildly enjoyable to some degree. I started the TNG book back when it first came out, but at that time I very rarely ever actually finished an entire novel (this is not the case anymore, if I make it past the first couple chapters of a book, then I'm almost certainly going to finish it) and I remember absolutely nothing about the little bit I read.
 
Though TNG is my favorite series, there are very few of its book I like.

Once Burned seems the standout favorite, but I'm not a big New Frontier fan. What's so great about it, or what do you like about your second choice?

Also which book has the most/best stuff about the mystical bar itself?
 
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