My collecting/reading plan of attack

[Desert Kris]

Yeah... The New Adventures were impressively written, but they didn't feel that much like Doctor Who a lot of the time. It wasn't just that they were more adult, but that they were so dark and solemn. I liked how sophisticated and intelligent they were, but they weren't as much fun as the show.

I think I was lucky in the sense that I didn't read them to fill in for the loss of the show, and ended up exploring them piecemeal after their halfway point. I'll visit one I haven't read every once if I want a DW story that is more on the serious end of the scale. I think I read somewhere that the authors pushed the boundaries with the idea of the series having it's own identity, like how different TNG Star Trek is from TOS.

Yeah, McIntyre's Sulu was strangely gloomy. In Entropy, I figured it was just the result of the tragic events of the story and the life decisions he was faced with, but then he was just as sullen and insecure in Enterprise: The First Adventure, and it just didn't feel like Sulu.

I do like that she still gives a sense of him as a well rounded individual. I found the alternative depiction okay from the standpoint of it being an alternative version of Star Trek, inspired by the show and movies, but developing along a different path.

 

[Falconer]

Hey, guys! It has been a busy week. Just a few points. I do like how TOS’s Enterprise is crewed almost entirely by humans. It really makes it feel like our adventure of exploration out into a gigantic universe. It also helps showcase TOS’s great diversity of real human ethnicities.

 

[Falconer]

Whoops, hit the reply button too soon. Ah well. It was kind of a minor point that I didn’t want to dwell on overmuch.

So which one is next for you? Are you going with publication order, with Yesterday's Son? I really like that one as it is a quick, short read that is a lot of fun but also has some quality drama, too.

Yep, that is by my bedside now — in hardcover!

Though I am also thinking of listening to the audiobook of The Entropy Effect. I think it would be worth a re-read now that things make sense, and I actually think the abridgement might to it some good. Not to mention Nimoy and Takei reading it.

I know you don't have Vonda McIntyre's movie novelizations in your list, but they kind of complement McIntyre's original novels. I know novelizations are a hard sell, when its so easy to just watch the movie.

I like books more than movies, so novelizations are not a hard sell in general. The problem is I’m just not a big enough fan of the movies to really want to dwell on them in any way. I really just love the TV show, and the more I can recapture that magic, the better. Also, while I liked McIntyre’s first novel, I’m not sure she really stands out to me as someone I especially want to read more of.

 

[RandyS]

I think I was lucky in the sense that I didn't read them to fill in for the loss of the show, and ended up exploring them piecemeal after their halfway point. I'll visit one I haven't read every once if I want a DW story that is more on the serious end of the scale. I think I read somewhere that the authors pushed the boundaries with the idea of the series having it's own identity, like how different TNG Star Trek is from TOS.



I do like that she still gives a sense of him as a well rounded individual. I found the alternative depiction okay from the standpoint of it being an alternative version of Star Trek, inspired by the show and movies, but developing along a different path.

Plus, he was drawn on the cover with long hair and a beard. That confused me until I read the book. I too took it as an alternate take on Star Trek.

 

[Falconer]

The Sulu B-plot was my single least favorite part of the story. He didn’t strike me as out of character—it seems reasonable to me from the little we see of him on TOS that his stoic face masked frustrated command ambitions and frustrated romantic ambitions. But I did think it was odd because it was hard to invest much interest in a character who was such a background character in the show, and also negligible in the A-plot of the novel.