So What Are you Reading?: Generations
- Thread starter captcalhoun
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M
marlboro
Guest
Excelsior: Forged in Fire
Good. It fills in a lot of history about the blood feud between the Klingons and the Albino as well as detailing how Sulu became captain of the Excelsior.
This book was longer than the average Trek novel, but there was no padding. I'm surprised that this wasn't split into a duology. Maybe it should have been. I say that because, by its very nature as a prequel, the story's climax occurs in DS9's "Blood Oath." Maybe splitting the book into a duology or even a trilogy with an added ending that consists of a retelling of Blood Oath? Or maybe I should just pop in the dvd?
That very minor complaint aside, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I'll be sure to check out some more Excelsior books.
Good. It fills in a lot of history about the blood feud between the Klingons and the Albino as well as detailing how Sulu became captain of the Excelsior.
This book was longer than the average Trek novel, but there was no padding. I'm surprised that this wasn't split into a duology. Maybe it should have been. I say that because, by its very nature as a prequel, the story's climax occurs in DS9's "Blood Oath." Maybe splitting the book into a duology or even a trilogy with an added ending that consists of a retelling of Blood Oath? Or maybe I should just pop in the dvd?
That very minor complaint aside, I enjoyed it quite a bit. I'll be sure to check out some more Excelsior books.
Plum Island by Nelson Demille. I'd read the other Corey novels before but missed the first one.
I just posted my review of DS9: Millennium, Book I of III: The Fall of Terok Nor by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens.
I'm currently reading The Lost Era: The Sundered by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels. I read it years ago, but wanted to take another look because we will be covering the Titan novels next year on Literary Treks and I wanted a refresher about the Neyel.
I'm currently reading The Lost Era: The Sundered by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels. I read it years ago, but wanted to take another look because we will be covering the Titan novels next year on Literary Treks and I wanted a refresher about the Neyel.
M
marlboro
Guest
The Patrian Transgression
I enjoyed it. It would have made a good episode.
McCoy gets around more than Kirk in some of these books. I'm starting to think they don't call him "Bones" because he's a doctor.
I enjoyed it. It would have made a good episode.
McCoy gets around more than Kirk in some of these books. I'm starting to think they don't call him "Bones" because he's a doctor.
Finally finished Well of Souls. I must say I really liked it. The saddest thing is, we all know what happened to the Enterprise C at Narrendra III.
I liked the involvement of the Hebetians. The Cardassians were mentioned, but always remained in the background. The book had many sad moments of loss and grief. Garrett's crew was like a family. It's time to say good bye to them.
I gues it was my last Trek novel this year. I'd like to continue with the novel version of Far Beyond the Stars. I own a very worn second-hand copy. Worf complains about humans being physically too fragile and I'm not fond of the quality of some paperpacks. But that's another topic....
I liked the involvement of the Hebetians. The Cardassians were mentioned, but always remained in the background. The book had many sad moments of loss and grief. Garrett's crew was like a family. It's time to say good bye to them.
I gues it was my last Trek novel this year. I'd like to continue with the novel version of Far Beyond the Stars. I own a very worn second-hand copy. Worf complains about humans being physically too fragile and I'm not fond of the quality of some paperpacks. But that's another topic....
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What happened?
Book 6 of New Frontier. Might take a break after that and read the Genesis Wave.
What happened?
Book 6 of New Frontier. Might take a break after that and read the Genesis Wave.
You're right, we don't know any details except that the crew was killed or captured by the Romulans. And Sela - to hell with her - was sired.
The latest episode of Literary Treks went up this weekend: Literary Treks 252: Continuity Cop, in which Bruce Gibson and I interview Keith R.A. DeCandido about his final book in the A Time To series: A Time for War, A Time for Peace. Hope you guys enjoy it!
I'm giving Iron Angel by Eric Flint and Alistair Kimble a go.
I finished up Captain Marvel Vol. 1: In Pursuit of Flight last night, and I started my next Dresden Files digital comic collection, Wild Card written by Jim Butcher and Mark Powers, art by Carlos Gomez and Sean Izaakse for issue 4, inks by Anthony Fowler Jr. for issue 3, and colors by Mohan.
Turn out in my first post about Capt. Marvel Vol. 1 I missed some artists, issue 3 featured art by Richard Elson & Will Quintana on pages 17 - 18, and Karl Kesel & Javier Rodrgez on page 19. Issue 4 featured art by Al Barrionuevo with colors by Wil Quitana on pages 16 - 20. Emma Rios took over as the main artist starting with issue 5.
Turn out in my first post about Capt. Marvel Vol. 1 I missed some artists, issue 3 featured art by Richard Elson & Will Quintana on pages 17 - 18, and Karl Kesel & Javier Rodrgez on page 19. Issue 4 featured art by Al Barrionuevo with colors by Wil Quitana on pages 16 - 20. Emma Rios took over as the main artist starting with issue 5.
20) STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS by Alan Dean Foster
It's ages since I watched the film, and I was curious to see whether I heard the original or JJ-verse cast in the novelisation. In the end I heard a mixture- Kirk and Spock were mostly Pine and Quinto, Bones was Bones, Sulu was, weirdly, mostly Nimoy, but Khan was solidly Montalban throughout... Which gives an interesting insight into the overall characterisation in the script. God only knows who Foster thought he was writing as Scotty, but apparently he's never heard either a Scottish accent or Simon Pegg.
Other than that, it wasn't Foster's best novelisation, but it was good solid fun- he brought some clarity to things like Khan's magic blood merely being a baseline from which Bones synthesized a new treatment, rather than just being magic blood, so it probably ended up being slightly better than the movie, IMO...
21) JONESY: NINE LIVES ON THE NOSTROMO by Rory Lucey
A nice little graphic story of Alien, from the POV of Jones the cat. The art is amusing, and it's good fun for anybody familiar with both the movie and cats. It would actually work really well as a version of Alien for younger kids, with a loveable character, some mild scares (probably) and no adult complexities – except that, because there's no words in the book at all, you'd have to explain all the context of what's going to your younger audience. (E.g. “Oh, here one of the crew has been injured on a planet”). But I loved it anyway cos I'm a cat-loving Alien geek, and that's really who'll get the most out of this.
It's ages since I watched the film, and I was curious to see whether I heard the original or JJ-verse cast in the novelisation. In the end I heard a mixture- Kirk and Spock were mostly Pine and Quinto, Bones was Bones, Sulu was, weirdly, mostly Nimoy, but Khan was solidly Montalban throughout... Which gives an interesting insight into the overall characterisation in the script. God only knows who Foster thought he was writing as Scotty, but apparently he's never heard either a Scottish accent or Simon Pegg.
Other than that, it wasn't Foster's best novelisation, but it was good solid fun- he brought some clarity to things like Khan's magic blood merely being a baseline from which Bones synthesized a new treatment, rather than just being magic blood, so it probably ended up being slightly better than the movie, IMO...
21) JONESY: NINE LIVES ON THE NOSTROMO by Rory Lucey
A nice little graphic story of Alien, from the POV of Jones the cat. The art is amusing, and it's good fun for anybody familiar with both the movie and cats. It would actually work really well as a version of Alien for younger kids, with a loveable character, some mild scares (probably) and no adult complexities – except that, because there's no words in the book at all, you'd have to explain all the context of what's going to your younger audience. (E.g. “Oh, here one of the crew has been injured on a planet”). But I loved it anyway cos I'm a cat-loving Alien geek, and that's really who'll get the most out of this.
New frontier The Return Part 1
I'm re reading Star Trek Ds9 Hollow Man by Una McCormack. This is one of favorite Ds9 books she;s writtern. I really like having Jadzia Dax and the other characters from the tv series having their own story arcs in this book. I finished it last night I like a novel that takes place during the Dominion war and how ruthless Section 31 agents are in this novel to achieve their goals no matter the costs to acheive it.
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M
marlboro
Guest
Twilight's End
Positives:
- A commendable emphasis on making the scientific aspects of the story believable. No technobabble magic wands here.
- I love the idea of a tidally locked planet as the setting for the story. I also enjoyed the exploration of how a society forced to exist in a small band that encircles the globe would develope. I wish there had been an even more in-depth exploration of that culture.
- I like how the two leads of the competing stratums of society weren't just white hats vs black hats. They both had their own not completely unselfish reasons for the things they did.
- I like the title. Don't know why, it just sounds cool. The cover is solid if not spectacular.
Negatives:
- Someone on Amazon remarked that this would have been better as a non-Trek original work, and I agree with them. You have a ridiculously daunting task for the Enterprise crew to tackle and the story plays out with only 4 main characters seeming to take on this impossibly complex task. Spock is knocked out of commission in a redshirt mission, Kirk is sidelined in a weak kidnapping storyline. McCoy, Sulu, and Scotty get stuck doing lab work. no one else really does anything. There just aren't enough interesting things for the guys to do.
- There is very little suspense. Imo, where the tension should have been focused is in the debate between the two proposed methods of saving the planet and not so much on finding out if the plans ultimately work. Granted, there is some of that, but the method mentioned on the cover blurb is the only one exciting enough to be the one chosen.
- Kirk's kidnapping plot was a real dud. The bad guys were so inept that he should have just challenged them to a game of Fizzbin and got the rescue mission over with. Instead, we have a tiresome plot about Kirk attempting to get his captors drunk. In Voyages of Imagination the author says the editor wanted Kirk to improvise an explosive and they compromised by having him jury-rig a Molotov cocktail. He should have listened to his editor; the scene comes across as something found on the cutting room floor of a MacGuyver script.
So this was a bit of a curate's egg, I suppose. I enjoyed the world building and the commitment to hard(er) science, but the execution of the story was mundane.
Traitor Winds
I didn't finish this one.
This starts off great. It's a completely Earthbound espionage/man on the run story with a focus on Sulu, Chekov, and Uhura. It was very exciting, imo, and it was great to see what these characters were doing pre TMP.
Early on it seemed tightly plotted, but then characters just seemed to be dropped into the story out of the blue. In one scene, four different characters walk into Uhura's office in succession to advance the plot. #1 enters, says his piece, leaves. #2 immediately walks in and does the same thing. It's like every character in the book is in her waiting room reading old magazines just waiting their turn to spell out the next piece of the story.
After this scene the writing never gets back to the quality of the opening chapters. Kirk makes a huge mental leap and somehow figures out one of the main motives of the bad guy. More and more characters just seem to show up when needed with little to nothing in the way of a plausible reason for being where they are.
What made me put the book down was how obvious the identity of the mystery bad guy was. It's telegraphed from his first scene, but I was hoping that since the writing was so good in the opening chapters that he was just a red herring. When the quality dipped, and didn't improve, I skipped ahead to see if the mystery villain was who I (and anyone else who has ever watched Scooby Doo) suspected. No, it wasn't Old Man Jenkins; just his equivalent. No need to go back and finish the book properly at that point.
This was the second book I've read by the L.A. Graf team. The first was Time's Enemy. Both books have several excellent qualities, but neither hold together once you start asking yourself "What is this character's motivation? How did this character/ship get here? Would an intelligent character really do actions X, Y, and Z?"
Ghost-Walker
Let's just get this out of the way right now
Ok if you've managed to recover from your fit of simultaneous giggling and screams of terror we can proceed.
This is actually a pretty good book. This is the second Trek book by Barbara Hambly that I've read, the other being Crossroad. I have enjoyed both. Like Crossroad, there is a vein of horror running through Ghost-Walker. Hambly has a knack for adding horror to Trek while still keeping the cast in character.
Positives:
- I liked Kirk's love interest, Helen. You can't go too in-depth with a new character in this type of book, but she was more than just a cardboard cutout only there to give Kirk a motivation. I found her interesting and sympathetic.
- I liked how the author mixed some darker elements into the story while keeping the TOS feel. I couldn't help but compare Helen to Rand in The Enemy within.
- The aliens may not look cool, but their society is very interesting to me.
- The villain, Yarblis Geshkerroth, was also a highlight. He starts out as your typical hard headed alien, turns into a "monster of the week" but ends up being much more complex than your average psycho psychic space rooster.
This is one I'd recommend.
Positives:
- A commendable emphasis on making the scientific aspects of the story believable. No technobabble magic wands here.
- I love the idea of a tidally locked planet as the setting for the story. I also enjoyed the exploration of how a society forced to exist in a small band that encircles the globe would develope. I wish there had been an even more in-depth exploration of that culture.
- I like how the two leads of the competing stratums of society weren't just white hats vs black hats. They both had their own not completely unselfish reasons for the things they did.
- I like the title. Don't know why, it just sounds cool. The cover is solid if not spectacular.
Negatives:
- Someone on Amazon remarked that this would have been better as a non-Trek original work, and I agree with them. You have a ridiculously daunting task for the Enterprise crew to tackle and the story plays out with only 4 main characters seeming to take on this impossibly complex task. Spock is knocked out of commission in a redshirt mission, Kirk is sidelined in a weak kidnapping storyline. McCoy, Sulu, and Scotty get stuck doing lab work. no one else really does anything. There just aren't enough interesting things for the guys to do.
- There is very little suspense. Imo, where the tension should have been focused is in the debate between the two proposed methods of saving the planet and not so much on finding out if the plans ultimately work. Granted, there is some of that, but the method mentioned on the cover blurb is the only one exciting enough to be the one chosen.
- Kirk's kidnapping plot was a real dud. The bad guys were so inept that he should have just challenged them to a game of Fizzbin and got the rescue mission over with. Instead, we have a tiresome plot about Kirk attempting to get his captors drunk. In Voyages of Imagination the author says the editor wanted Kirk to improvise an explosive and they compromised by having him jury-rig a Molotov cocktail. He should have listened to his editor; the scene comes across as something found on the cutting room floor of a MacGuyver script.
So this was a bit of a curate's egg, I suppose. I enjoyed the world building and the commitment to hard(er) science, but the execution of the story was mundane.
Traitor Winds
I didn't finish this one.
This starts off great. It's a completely Earthbound espionage/man on the run story with a focus on Sulu, Chekov, and Uhura. It was very exciting, imo, and it was great to see what these characters were doing pre TMP.
Early on it seemed tightly plotted, but then characters just seemed to be dropped into the story out of the blue. In one scene, four different characters walk into Uhura's office in succession to advance the plot. #1 enters, says his piece, leaves. #2 immediately walks in and does the same thing. It's like every character in the book is in her waiting room reading old magazines just waiting their turn to spell out the next piece of the story.
After this scene the writing never gets back to the quality of the opening chapters. Kirk makes a huge mental leap and somehow figures out one of the main motives of the bad guy. More and more characters just seem to show up when needed with little to nothing in the way of a plausible reason for being where they are.
What made me put the book down was how obvious the identity of the mystery bad guy was. It's telegraphed from his first scene, but I was hoping that since the writing was so good in the opening chapters that he was just a red herring. When the quality dipped, and didn't improve, I skipped ahead to see if the mystery villain was who I (and anyone else who has ever watched Scooby Doo) suspected. No, it wasn't Old Man Jenkins; just his equivalent. No need to go back and finish the book properly at that point.
This was the second book I've read by the L.A. Graf team. The first was Time's Enemy. Both books have several excellent qualities, but neither hold together once you start asking yourself "What is this character's motivation? How did this character/ship get here? Would an intelligent character really do actions X, Y, and Z?"
Ghost-Walker
Let's just get this out of the way right now
Ok if you've managed to recover from your fit of simultaneous giggling and screams of terror we can proceed.
This is actually a pretty good book. This is the second Trek book by Barbara Hambly that I've read, the other being Crossroad. I have enjoyed both. Like Crossroad, there is a vein of horror running through Ghost-Walker. Hambly has a knack for adding horror to Trek while still keeping the cast in character.
Positives:
- I liked Kirk's love interest, Helen. You can't go too in-depth with a new character in this type of book, but she was more than just a cardboard cutout only there to give Kirk a motivation. I found her interesting and sympathetic.
- I liked how the author mixed some darker elements into the story while keeping the TOS feel. I couldn't help but compare Helen to Rand in The Enemy within.
- The aliens may not look cool, but their society is very interesting to me.
- The villain, Yarblis Geshkerroth, was also a highlight. He starts out as your typical hard headed alien, turns into a "monster of the week" but ends up being much more complex than your average psycho psychic space rooster.
This is one I'd recommend.
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New Frontier The Return Part II
Just posted my review of TNG: A Time to Hate by Robert Greenberger.
Finished reading The Lost Era: The Sundered by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels. Really enjoyed this one! It's been a long time since I read it, and it definitely holds up.
Just started reading New Earth, Book 1: Wagon Train to the Stars by Diane Carey. I started reading this series years ago and didn't make it very far. Giving it another go!
Finished reading The Lost Era: The Sundered by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels. Really enjoyed this one! It's been a long time since I read it, and it definitely holds up.
Just started reading New Earth, Book 1: Wagon Train to the Stars by Diane Carey. I started reading this series years ago and didn't make it very far. Giving it another go!
M
marlboro
Guest
From your review:
"While I was slightly disappointed in A Time to Love, I found myself enjoying A Time to Hate much more. In the former novel, I felt that too much time was dedicated to setting things up and treading water, seemingly to stretch the story out."
I think this is true of most of the "A Time to..." duologies. There are some good ideas, and great character moments in this series, but they are drowned in excessive padding. I can't help but think we would have ended up with a classic 5 book series if the authors had the time to refine their best ideas into a single cohesive book instead of having to worry about stretching to fill an unnecessary second volume.
Lower sales in the short run, but I think publishing higher quality books would have paid off in the long term. Or maybe not. Who knows?
p.s. I think there is a great book hiding in Sow/Harvest. All the pieces are there - they're just in the wrong order and hidden in a haystack of recapping. It will never happen, but I'd love to see the authors do a remix of that one.
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