Still waiting for editorial feedback on my Birthright monograph -- editor Paul Simpson has been having some health issues, so things have been delayed a bit, unfortunately. Glad to hear good things about the inaugural volumes.....
Hm.. I ordered a couple weeks ago and the order is still processing. Seems slow given the exorbitant overseas postage costs. Oh well.
Oh. You're writing on Birthright? That should be interesting. I mean, I expect I'll be buying all of the Gold Archives, but this seems like a particularly good match of author and subject. You're not paying for speed, you're paying because international postal rates are insane these days. And there's a global pandemic going on.
I bought the Disco volume, 'Through the Valley of Shadows' -- the Kindle edition, due to postage prices & times -- and I like it. I agree the author 'gets it' and nicely ties the Disco episode with Menagerie, etc. I've learned interesting tidbits of American history. The birds-eye view the author offers, with the time crystal being a metaphor for how the past & future of Star Trek is reflected in what's going on in this particular Disco episode, is illuminatingly synthetic. Whenever I encounter pretentious verbiage, I tend to revel in jubilant conviviality. ;-) However, this author has put so much thesauric effort in the piece that it hampers readability. He seems to be proud of how on his view the time crystal is a 'meta-fictional superstructure', a concept which is supposed to be familiar to the readers of his previous Black Archive entry. Whew. Come on. Just like not every two things form a 'dialectic', you don't need to call any element of an episode which relates to a different episode 'metafictional', and not every overarching form needs to be a 'superstructure'. (Also, isn't 'meta' with 'super' just too much? Wouldn't 'metafictional structure' suffice?) The book could've used another editorial pass. I think some sentences feature in two versions, one next to the other, with the second one being the corrected one :-) However, don't let me sound too negative here. This is good effort. It's a nice, informative, thought-through volume on an important Disco episode. And it's really cheap. I know I'll be buying more. (@KRAD 's piece for sure.)
The first three arrived today in perfect condition. I look forward to reading at least one of them this weekend. I should probably revisit the episode under consideration first, though.
That's certainly the plan. As KRAD mentioned a few posts back, the series editor is having some health issues.
Thanks, fellow fans, for the reminder. I ordered the first three volumes. They're now safely in Calibre and my Kobo. I'll start one once I finish my current read.
I think they were spreading them over a couple of batches anyway. I know I delivered mine, so it and the others should turn up in due course this year.
The editor, Paul Simpson, is recovering nicely from a surgical procedure, and according to his most recent status update, he should be diving back into editing the outstanding monographs (including mine and @Lonemagpie's) by month's end.
While everyone's waiting for the next set of Gold Archives to come out, we've created Lulu editions, which should hopefully cut down on the painful trans-Atlantic shipping costs for non UK readers... Return of the Archons Through the Valley of Shadows Spock's Brain