I wonder if anyone's told Harlan...
Sky's the Limit and SNW
- Thread starter RyanLevy
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Shhhh!
You think if someone had, it would still be a secret?
*smiles*
At times, I envy your mind and memory.
I've read seven out of the ten. How many of the Tribble stories were in the later books? It seemed to me that there was one each year towards the end.
At times, I envy your mind and memory.
I've read seven out of the ten. How many of the Tribble stories were in the later books? It seemed to me that there was one each year towards the end.
I hear what you're saying, and I wouldn't necessarily describe you as a "vocal" SNW opponent as a result, but your description of SNW 9 acts as an implicit negative review of the other volumes: "Well, I can't say that the other ones are bad, but I disliked this one so much that I haven't bought or read most of the others."
For someone who comes to a board like this asking for an opinion, and who doesn't have access to a full-on review from you (unlike The Sky's the Limit, two of whose stories you reviewed before the book even came out), this has the same effect as an actual negative review of the book(s) in question.
Now, I'm curious, which story in which volume?
I think that's "Captain Proton and the Orb of Bajor," the script for a putative episode of a Captain Proton radio serial, written by Benny Russell. It's in SNW IV.
FWIW I would really like to get hold of some of the earlier volumes, especially SNW II & SNW III with Dayton's stories, but they aren't available on amazon new, and I don't like to buy used books via the Internet, and sites like eBay in General. I'm a bit old school when it comes to purchasing things, I guess.
As for SNW 10, it was on the list of my last amazon order until the last second, but then I saw that they finally had Crucible: Spock back in stock (they had it listed as not stocked for quite a while, and have so again) SNW 10 was put back on the things to remember list, hence my "other things taking priority" comment above. And the decision to not making SNW a priority was mostly a decision against Dean Wesley Smith's story selection abilities (I want to add: I mean his abilities to choose stories I really like, not his editorial abilities in general), and since he was responsible for all volumes and I had a sample of 4/9 of the volumes, I feel I had a valid basis to make that judgment for me personally.
I'm not sure if the sentence about me reviewing the stories before the book was available was meant as criticism, but I want to add that I clearly stated that those were based on the full story excerpts. I reread them when the book came out to see if the reviews were still accurate.
As for a review of SNW 9 here are my comments for the first twelve stories (TOS/TNG/DS9), it's too long since I read the anthology to add comments for the other stories:
“TOS : Gone Native” by John Coffren
A disappointing story, especially because I liked his previous SNW entry “Future Shock”. But this story is lacking in several areas. For one I don’t really see the draw of the story, at no point of the story I really get a sense of reading something important. Add to this that the characters remain very one dimensional and you get a not very appealing or significant story.
Overall : 55 %
“TOS : A Bad Day for Koloth” by David DeLee
No matter what David DeLee tried to achieve with this story he wasn’t successful. If he tried to give an interesting explanation how Koloth got rid of the tribbles, he wasn’t successful, because the whole exercise was kind of unnecessary. If the other Klingon ship was as close as its quick arrival seems to indicate, why not just let them come and beam the tribbles off the ship? If he tried to write a worthy sequel to the episode he hasn’t succeeded, either, it has neither the absurdity nor the wit of the episode. The only thing somewhat remarkable is the acceptable character work, but overall this story is only an average and unremarkable story.
Overall : 58 %
“TOS : Book of Fulfillment” by Steven Costa
In my opinion this story is a failed experiment. It might be interesting to experiment with different kind of story telling devices, but it shouldn’t be done just for the sake of it. And this story is lacking plot to really give the theoretically quite interesting biblical story telling method a real chance to work. It all remains sketchy and ineffective.
Overall : 40 %
“TOS : The smallest Choices” by Jeremy Yoder
This is the first story that at least shows some potential. The setting feels a bit to constructed , but to see the effects on T’Pring’s life after her decision to choose Stonn over Spock is certainly interesting. The writing is somewhat bland, but the character work is good, so that this is the best TOS story buy a large margin, although it’s “just” an O.K. story overall.
Overall : 69 %
“TNG : Staying the Course” by Paul C. Tseng
“Staying the Course” is a well written piece and for the second time in a row Tseng has written the best piece of the anthology. The idea behind the story isn’t really the most original one, but in contrast to most other stories in the anthology he offers a good quality in all of the other important parts of writing.
Overall : 77 %
“TNG : Home Soil” by Jim Johnson
An O.K., but overall routine story. The strength of it is that everything (character work, writing style, originality) is on a constant and decent level, but on the other side there is nothing outstanding on the positive end in it either. It’s one of the better stories in SNW 09 and a nice enough way to kill some time, but nonetheless it’s a story you’ll stop thinking about relatively fast, because it has nothing special to remember, be it positive or negative.
Rating : 70 %
“TNG : Terra Tonight” by Scott Pearson
An average story. My main problem with it is that it was a bit to constructed for my taste. Even if the girl is using a civilian frequency I don’t understand why Starfleet allows Scotty to do all this on a live news show, he just as well could have done this from a different (unused studio). There was a chance of failure and I doubt Starfleet would be eager to show the death of a crew of young cadets live on TV. And If you look at it from outside the box, I think the whole framework with the TV show is unnecessary for the story anyway.
Overall : 62 %
“TNG : Solace in Bloom” by Jeff D. Jacques
If being average needs an example this story is a good one. It has a mildly interesting topic, features medium quality writing, good, but standard characterizations and a message delivered with the big hammer instead of subtlety.
Overall : 64 %
“DS9 : Shadowed Allies” by Emily P. Bloch
This story suffers under the been there, done that problem. At least that’s what I felt reading this story, everything seems to be just a variation of things already done in the series or novels, since the revisiting of the past by means of the prophets/visions has become somewhat regular in the DS9 saga. The writing and characterizations aren’t bad, but not good either.
Overall : 58 %
“DS9 : Living on the Edge of Existence” by Gerri Leen
Writing a Celestial Temple scene isn’t an easy task and Gerri Leen wasn’t fully up to it in my opinion. Her idea to show a fraction of Sisko’s time with the prophets and to showcase his interaction with his “mother” after the series finale certainly has an appeal to it. But the whole scene doesn’t really feel like the temple visions we have seen in the series and I have to admit that Curzon’s visit ruined it for me even more. Overall a story with a lot of potential, but to many distracting little weaknesses to make it a good story.
Overall : 59 %
“DS9 : The last Tree on Ferenginar – A Ferengi Fable from the Future” by Mike McDevitt
An O.K. story.
Mike McDevitt gives the Christmas Carol story a nice Ferengi twist and creates an amusing little story in the process, but the biggest strength of the story is certainly the characterization. The story lacks a certain depth to get a better rating, but nonetheless this story is one of the better stories of the anthology.
Overall : 71 %
“DS9 : The Tribbles´ Pagh” by Ryan M. Williams
An average story,
It’s actually an interesting little tidbit about the DS9 saga that Mr. Williams has written his story about. How exactly DS9 dealt with all the tribbles we saw at the end of the anniversary episode? And his execution is satisfactory on all fronts, too, but the story felt a bit rushed, especially in the end, so that I felt that the author has wasted the potential of a better story.
Overall : 66 %
Eh. Those suck ass.
Oh, I'm not saying that a negative review(er) would keep me from enjoying the SNW volumes on a personal level...Eh, no sense letting one negative reviewer ruin your enjoyment of the volumes or the series....but seeing that even two of the people who define hardcore TrekLit fandom haven't read the last volumes in the SNW series, I begin to understand why it happened.
What I am saying is that if people who are clearly thinking more about TrekLit than the average consumer are/were still not thinking about SNW (or thinking about it in a negative light), that's somewhat indicative that average consumers themselves would have even less reason to consider the series.
I totally agree, and I'm proud to be in SNW 10 with you.The big draw of SNW for me as a reader and as a writer was that I could get a healthy dose of Star Trek stories (18-21 stories in each volume) that weren't tied to any continuity other than the ones I knew from the shows and movies. I didn't have to read multi-volume series to pick up on the inside jokes or to understand what had happened before.
I did have to figure out what episodes to watch in some cases, but hey, Star Trek research is fun.
Pocket still seems to be interested in continuing with anthologies, at least in the immediate future...
Seeing the differing attitudes/amount of attention paid to SNW (versus books like The Sky's the Limit) is enlightening, though.
Since basically only Steve, T'Bonz and I have given feedback, I'm curious what you found so enlightening, since I guess you're at least partly referring to the fact that I wrote a review for The Sky's the Limit when I wrote none for SNW 09.
Maybe I should give you a little more background: at the time I read SNW 09 I felt a bit burned out on writing reviews anyway (FWIW Reap the Whirlwind is another "victim" that got no review in that period), and the fact that the stories weren't that impressive only heightened that, so I kind of lost interest halfway through the review.
The Sky's the Limit benefited from the fact that I had found renewed interest in writing reviews by the time I read it and that I got the invitation to become part of Unreality SF pretty much while I was reading it and so it was one of the first that got the Unreality treatment so to speak.
So it has little to do with the fact that SNW was not written by authors who haven't had (m)any professional stories published previously, if that is what you got out of this thread.
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So it has little to do with the fact that SNW was not written by professional authors, if that is what you got out of this thread.
Every published SNW author is by definition a professional author since SNW was a professional-level publication. They may have started as non-pros when submitting the stories (such as myself) but once they got at least one into the book, they became pros.
My impression goes beyond this thread, to my own experiences trying to track down reviews for SNW volumes (not just the one I'm in
) versus finding reviews for other TrekLit novels/anthologies.I appreciate the background you provided on your own particular case.
Seeing two prominent TrekLit reviewers respond so quickly, back-to-back, with "I've read this, but I haven't read that" did jump out at me, but I'm not trying to single you out, since I'd noticed some general trends before......and your case doesn't change those trends, e.g. novels get reviewed more than anthologies, and the themed anthologies seemed to get reviewed more than SNW did.
By definition, SNW was written by professional authors.So it has little to do with the fact that SNW was not written by professional authors, if that is what you got out of this thread.
It's a professional sale, just like any other.
So it has little to do with the fact that SNW was not written by professional authors, if that is what you got out of this thread.
Every published SNW author is by definition a professional author since SNW was a professional-level publication.
Yeah, why not play semantics, even when you most likely are well aware that I was referring to the fact that only people were eligible who hadn't sold three professionaly published stories yet and by that weren't eligible for a SFWA membership or an Author's Guild membership for example.
BTW if you're trying to "protect" the SNW contest against me, there's really no need. The fact that I'm not the biggest fan of some of the volumes, doesn't change the fact that I think it was a good thing such a contest existed. So you can stop trying to find sentences in my post that give you an opening for an attack.
Semantics has nothing to do with it. Your fact was in error. A SNW writer with even one story published in the anthology is a professional writer. Three sales certainly gets you eligible for membership in a pro organization (it's how I joined SFWA) but just one sale is enough to be called a professional writer.
If you consider someone correcting erroneous 'facts' to be an attack on you, you might be posting in the wrong place.
If you consider someone correcting erroneous 'facts' to be an attack on you, you might be posting in the wrong place.
I have edited the sentence in question.
And I think I take your unspoken advice and at least scale down my time here for a while since I realized that I seem to get in unnecessary discussions lately because of minor things, and I think it's mostly myself to blame.
ETA: I somehow missed this post until now:
My impression goes beyond this thread, to my own experiences trying to track down reviews for SNW volumes (not just the one I'm in
By a freak coincidence both message boards I posted my SNW I & VII reviews on aren't online anymore (startreknow and booktrek). I've changed computers a short time ago and managed to loose the backup cd with my reviews, so what isn't online anywhere is lost I fear and that includes those two reviews.
ETA2:
Actually I have to correct myself: Short Comments by me on the stories of SNW I and SNW VII are still online, but only in German I fear.
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I've always wondered exactly what you said about "Full Circle." Here's the Babel Fish translation: clumsy, of course, but your intent is clear:
"It is to be seen nice that Captain (here admiral) brings John Harriman of people to it good stories over it to write, although it looked in star Trek VII like a perfect idiot. That has to probably not last do with the novel "Serpents among the of ruin", which gave it very many more facets and to here also partly refers. Scooty's "influence" on the TNG part of ST VII to see is nicely, even if he knows me somewhat too fast, what Soran intends."
I started this story before Serpents Among the Ruins came out, but then did a lot of last-second revising for continuity because I loved the novel so much . . .
I've always wondered exactly what you said about "Full Circle." Here's the Babel Fish translation: clumsy, of course, but your intent is clear:
"It is to be seen nice that Captain (here admiral) brings John Harriman of people to it good stories over it to write, although it looked in star Trek VII like a perfect idiot. That has to probably not last do with the novel "Serpents among the of ruin", which gave it very many more facets and to here also partly refers. Scooty's "influence" on the TNG part of ST VII to see is nicely, even if he knows me somewhat too fast, what Soran intends."
I started this story before Serpents Among the Ruins came out, but then did a lot of last-second revising for continuity because I loved the novel so much . . .
Here's a hopefully less clumsy translation
:It's nice to see that Captain John Harriman (Admiral here) inspires people to write good stories about him despite the fact that he looked like a total idiot in Star Trek VII. That propably has something to do with the novel Serpents among the Ruins, which gave him a lot of extra facets and to which this story partly refers. To see Scotty's "influence" on the TNG part of ST VII is a nice thing, although he knows a bit to fast what Soran is up to for my taste.
It's stories like yours and the stories by David R. George and Peter David that make it believable that this man could have reached the status of a Starship Captain. If we only had his appearance in the movie that would shed a bad light on Starfleet's promotion system in my opinion.
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