Love McDevitts Alex Benedict stuff, need to get to this
Non-star Trek books for Star Trek fans
- Thread starter Miami Vice Admiral
- Start date
I looked up Speaker for the Dead on Wikipedia, and now I know what @Allyn Gibson was talking about. Spoilers weren't an issue, given that I have better stuff to read.
I suspect that at least some people here (perhaps not as many as on Fountain Pen Network or PIPORG-L) know that I'm a classical music geek, with subscriptions to a series and a half at Hollywood Bowl (i.e., the entire 10-concert Tuesday Evening series, and the odd half of the Thursday Evening series), and two 4-concert series at Disney Hall (whichever of the two Colburn Celebrity Recital series looks the most interesting to me, and one of the two Chamber Music series). There are only two composers for whom I will do a "subscriber privilege" exchange to avoid: Mahler, because most (but not all; I rather like the "Titan" Symphony) of his stuff bores me, and Wagner, because nothing he wrote is good enough, in my estimation, to make up for his being a Nazi before Hitler was even born (I'm Goyish, and I have Jewish friends who are more forgiving of Wagner).
And then there's The Novel Which I Shall Not Name In Public (because I don't want to be the reason anybody develops sufficient morbid curiosity to buy a copy). I'm constitutionally incapable of book-burning, but I have considered sealing it into a stud cavity of a building. The only favorable thing I can say about it is that it proves that a truly self-published opus, that isn't weighed down by any known vanity imprint, can make it into the brick-and-mortar bookstores, even if it's pure equine scat. In other words, there may be hope for my own unpublished opus yet, because it isn't equine scat, or any other kind of scat.
But they are the exception, not the rule. In general, I can forgive an author (or a composer, or any other artist) quite a bit. Now that I've finally gotten around to reading the Harry Potter series, I'm buying British editions to avoid U.S. editorial changes, and I'm buying them on the used market to avoid adding directly to JKR's royalty revenues, but I'm still buying and reading them, one by one. But in the case of the Ender series, neither the author nor the subject matter hold any appeal for me. Not when I have ADF's entire HC milieu (to date) occupying a dedicated shelf in my library, and I've got all the ST novels of CLB, GC, DM, DW, DD, JK, JMF, JS, and UMcC (although she did have that one opus I don't think I'll be re-reading any time before heat-death of the universe, because of the subject matter) to choose from.
(And just because Barbara Hambly inflicted drochs upon SW readers doesn't mean I don't absolutely adore her ST/HCTB unauthorized crossover, Ishmael.)
I suspect that at least some people here (perhaps not as many as on Fountain Pen Network or PIPORG-L) know that I'm a classical music geek, with subscriptions to a series and a half at Hollywood Bowl (i.e., the entire 10-concert Tuesday Evening series, and the odd half of the Thursday Evening series), and two 4-concert series at Disney Hall (whichever of the two Colburn Celebrity Recital series looks the most interesting to me, and one of the two Chamber Music series). There are only two composers for whom I will do a "subscriber privilege" exchange to avoid: Mahler, because most (but not all; I rather like the "Titan" Symphony) of his stuff bores me, and Wagner, because nothing he wrote is good enough, in my estimation, to make up for his being a Nazi before Hitler was even born (I'm Goyish, and I have Jewish friends who are more forgiving of Wagner).
And then there's The Novel Which I Shall Not Name In Public (because I don't want to be the reason anybody develops sufficient morbid curiosity to buy a copy). I'm constitutionally incapable of book-burning, but I have considered sealing it into a stud cavity of a building. The only favorable thing I can say about it is that it proves that a truly self-published opus, that isn't weighed down by any known vanity imprint, can make it into the brick-and-mortar bookstores, even if it's pure equine scat. In other words, there may be hope for my own unpublished opus yet, because it isn't equine scat, or any other kind of scat.
But they are the exception, not the rule. In general, I can forgive an author (or a composer, or any other artist) quite a bit. Now that I've finally gotten around to reading the Harry Potter series, I'm buying British editions to avoid U.S. editorial changes, and I'm buying them on the used market to avoid adding directly to JKR's royalty revenues, but I'm still buying and reading them, one by one. But in the case of the Ender series, neither the author nor the subject matter hold any appeal for me. Not when I have ADF's entire HC milieu (to date) occupying a dedicated shelf in my library, and I've got all the ST novels of CLB, GC, DM, DW, DD, JK, JMF, JS, and UMcC (although she did have that one opus I don't think I'll be re-reading any time before heat-death of the universe, because of the subject matter) to choose from.
(And just because Barbara Hambly inflicted drochs upon SW readers doesn't mean I don't absolutely adore her ST/HCTB unauthorized crossover, Ishmael.)
I forgot to say, I read Sentenced to Prism last week and I totally agree that the Humanx Commonwealth series will appeal to Star Trek fans.
Also, not to create a huge digression, but what are your favorite Star Trek compositions? Curious to hear from someone who really knows classical.
That’s a good idea. That way, when our post-apocalyptic descendants find it so carefully preserved in such a safe place, they’ll realize that someone must have taken such extraordinary measures to protect it from the conflagration because it was the pinnacle of Before Times literature, and then they will revere it as the centrepiece of their society.
And they'll re-create the whole world based upon it...hmm, where have we heard that one before?
No way dude, you already know future people are going to base their society on our Elvis love.
Hmm. You describe the Nuclear Waste Dump Problem. Which seems appropriate.
My Uncle Emmett was the world's leading authority on the study of ancient Mycenaean clay tablets, which were mostly minor things like business and inventory records, receipts, bureaucratic paperwork, etc., because all the important literature and poetry and government edicts and historical records and stuff were on papyrus scrolls that were destroyed when the cities burned, whereas the unimportant stuff was on disposable clay tablets that were baked by the fires and thus preserved for posterity.
Man, this was not on my Christopher L Bennett bingo card
Uncle Emmett was probably the most famous person I'm related to, but only among classical scholars. He was also a codebreaker during WWII and constructed the letter frequency tables that helped Michael Ventris decipher the Linear B alphabet. Once I name-dropped him to my college mythology professor, who was duly impressed and called Emmett "one of the gods of Linear B."
I dedicated The Buried Age to Emmett, and there are some nods to his work and his colleagues in the book, since it's a story about archaeology.
Almost anything by Goldsmith or Horner. Especially Goldsmith.
McCarthy is also pretty good. So is Giacchino (especially his open for PRO, part of which reminds me of Sibelius, in the same way that moments of the Dvořák 9th remind me of moments in the Beethoven 9th, and parts of which sound like they'd work really well on theatre organ -- and theatre organ is just about the precise opposite of my taste in organs).
Also, it's not without reason that certain first- and second-season TOS themes got reused a lot.
I love Goldsmith’s work so I’m glad to have validation by an expert!
For what it's worth, my great-grandfather was killed trying to rob a bank in Seattle.
I still have a xerox of the old newspaper headline: "Would-Be Robber Believed Insane."
(And, yes, I'm going to work that headline into a book someday.)
The opening of the serise goes so hard
"
“In the streets of Hau-kai, we wait. Night comes, winter descends, The lights of the world grow cold. And, in this three-hundredth year From the ascendancy of Bilat, He will come who treads the dawn. Tramples the sun beneath his feet, And judges the souls of men. He will stride across the rooftops, And he will fire the engines of God.”
Hmm.
ADF has opening lines that rival Tolkien's "In a hole in the ground lived a Hobbit."
The Tar-Aiym Krang: The Flinx was an ethical thief in that he stole only from the crooked.
Nor Crystal Tears: It's hard to be a larva.
Icerigger: The man in the Antares bar-lounge didn't quite bang his head on the curved star-ceiling on this, his fourth attempt.
Not from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?I'm not sure if you're joking, but, just in case you're not, Bujold has been a hugely popular SF writer for decades now: awards, bestsellers, fan clubs, conventions, etc.
Which reminds me of a funny story:
A few years back, a fannish couple introduced to me to their new baby daughter, "Cordelia."
"Ah," I said, nodding sagely. "From King Lear."
"No, from Lois Bujold."
Presumably all later Cordelias are ultimately named after Cordelia of Britain, the basis of Shakespeare's Cordelia and the earliest documented bearer of the name.
A few years ago, I made the mistake of trying to read through them all after getting one here and there from the library in prior years. And I decided to do it in chronological order. They're good individually, but back-to-back, they're pretty repetative (the Academy is getting its funding cut, unless we can make contact with an unknown alien species! There is no mention of what happened with the unknown alien species we saved the Academy by encountering in the last three books, there just aren't aliens again.). The actual space adventures are good, but the setting is almost anti-serialized in terms of what carries over from book to book, episodic to the point of almost feeling anthological. And the prequel had all the modern sci-fi trappings (holograms, volitional AIs) of the later books that weren't present in the first couple novels from the '80s, which made it a real whiplash reading it when it took place.
So I'll second the recommendation, but with the caveat that you shouldn't binge them straight through, but just pick one up every now and then between books, when the details of the prior one aren't as fresh. And I did like the Alex Benedict books as well, even though Polaris did have the poor luck to be the trigger from my teenage existential crisis where I understood death was real and coming for us all (I'm better now).
Hm. I'm not sure how the regular Benedict plot device of starting off by interviewing a holographic AI reconstruction of whatever historical person-of-interest is at the center of their current space-archeology mystery would play today, when it's possible, frequently disturbing, and kind of crappy.
