So What Are you Reading?: Generations

Just posted my review of TNG: Triangle: Imzadi II by Peter David.

Recently finished Turtles All the Way Down by Hank Green, and currently reading Star Trek #93: New Earth, Book Five: Thin Air by Kristine Kathryn Rusch & Dean Wesley Smith.

 

I had been reading The Janus Gate by L.A. Graf. I was about halfway through the first book, but it just isnt going anywhere. So I might go back and do a re-read of the Crucible trilogy and then the Legacies trilogy.

 

Things pick up in the latter two books, as I recall. I own it in a book-club edition that's all three books in one hardcover, and somehow the pacing works better with the first volume as the warm-up of a single larger story than as a nominally complete book in itself.

 

Yep i own the same copy. I think its all the scenes with Kirk and the away team running around in caves, while the Enterprise keeps losing her orbit, that im having an issue with. Just dragging the story. But i decided i'll just keep at the story. TBH, the story really did hook me at first. I'm just hoping the cave scenes are going somewhere.

 

I finished Star Trek: The Next Generation: Section 31: Rogue by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels.
I'm now reading Star Trek: The Original Series: My Brother's Keeper: Republic by Michael Jan Friedman.

 

I finished re-reading a fantasy series The rings of Allaire by Susan Dexter . I'm now reading book 2 The sword of Calandra by Susan Dexter.

 

Just finished "Enterprise" by Vonda McIntyre. Found it a little disappointing actually. Everyones... well... a bit of a git actually. Seemed a little off. Currently reading "The Kobayashi Maru" by Julian Ecklar and having much more fun with it. Have the "Star Trek: Legacies" series to read next and am looking forward to it, Greg Cox, Dayton Ward and David Mack seem to be the current luminaries of Trek fiction.

 

Just finished my review of TNG: Death in Winter by Michael Jan Friedman. It wasn't bad, but not terrific either. I enjoyed the Romulan politics in the novel, but some other aspects of the story felt off to me.

Recently finished New Earth: Thin Air by Kristine Kathryn Rusch & Dean Wesley Smith. I found it a big improvement over the previous novels in the series; I actually quite enjoyed it. I'm currently reading TOS: The Captain's Oath by Christopher L. Bennett.

 

I'm currently reading Far Beyond the Stars, DS9.

 

The mountains of Channadran by Susan Dexter

 

Around the Moon (Jules Verne, 1870). Barbicane, Nicholl, and Ardan have just achieved lunar orbit (which is where From the Earth to the Moon had left them). Rather nice edition, combining both books, with all the illustrations from the 1873 English translation. Possibly a facsimile edition. Alas, the translation is not as good as the (unillustrated) edition I started with.

And I'm also about a third of the way into Adam Winkler's Gunfight. He has just outlined the two extremist positions on gun control, and is about to go into the history that demonstrates his thesis that neither extreme position is correct, and that gun rights and gun control have in fact coexisted in the U.S. for over two centuries.

 

^Sounds intriguing.

Just finished David Mack’s ST Titan: Fortune of War. I liked it and it was pretty self contained. Haven’t read a trek book in several months so was worried I wouldn’t know what was going on. The ending was pretty satisfying to me too. Sometimes I don’t like too tidy an ending; I like to hope that these stories will go ever on and on but this was not too much and not too little. Bit of a Goldilocks tale.

 

Dayton Ward said something on Twitter the other day (about Apollo 11) that prompted some musing that I really wished James Michener's Space were available on DVD, because I could imagine a binge watch of The Right Stuff and From the Earth to the Moon and Apollo 13 and Space (even though that's fictional) all in close proximity. Then I realized that I probably had never read Michener's novel, and when coincidentally Space appeared in a bargain ebook newsletter the next day I took that as a sign and bought the book immediately.

Space tells a fictionalized version of the story of the American space program, beginning during World War II and carrying on through about 1980, give or take, as seen through the eyes of four men (a World War II Navy veteran and United States senator, a Navy pilot of the Korean War who becomes a test pilot, an engineer from the German rocket program who dreams of multi-stage rockets, and an American civilian engineer who helps the German engineers escape from Germany to work for the United States government on their rocket program) and the people around them.

I have not finished the book yet -- like 95% of Michener's work, it's a doorstopper, even as an ebook -- and Sputnik hasn't even been launched by the Soviets. Yet, I wanted to talk about one aspect of Michener's book that I find absolutely fascinating.

Space is an alternate history. Not in the sense that Michener created fictional characters to tell a story about the factual events around early American space exploration. In the sense that the United States of Space is not our United States. It has at least two additional states -- Fremont and Red River. Fremont is sort of in the Kansas/Nebraska/Colorado area, but it doesn't replace any of these, as those states also exist. Red River, at least to where I am, is a little more difficult to figure out, but it's somewhere near the Ozarks (since the Senator from Red River talks about hunting in the Ozarks). Perhaps Red River is like West Virginia, a part of Arkansas that broke away from the state during the Civil War and formed its own Northern-aligned government. Fremont is a bit harder to figure, because its major cities (named after Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun) don't align with any known cities, but I can almost imagine a scenario where it was admitted during the Civil War, much as Nevada was, in order to pad the Electoral College for the Republican Party. Yet, in the early 1950s there are still only 96 Senators, indicating 48 states, so which states do not exist? Are states we know combined into one in Michener's alternate history? Possibly the Dakotas admitted as a single state, and Arizona and New Mexico as a single state?

Michener is trying to tell a story about the space program, and I'm trying to figure out his alternate history's point of departure.

As for the book itself, it's fine. Michener can sometimes be frustrating to read because his characters are underdeveloped (frankly, I don't understand Elinor Grant and her motivations at all) or because he pulls his narrative POV back so far that it feels like mental whiplash. Still, there are moments of subtlety and genius, like an early passage that prefigures Carl Sagan's own "Pale Blue Dot."

 

While I wait for christopher Bennett''s new TOS book to release, I'm going to re-read one of his old ones, Ex Machina. Recently I've been watching a ton of TOS, and I got to For the World is Hollow, and I also watched TMP earlier tonight. Really got me in the mood for that book. I cant believe that book is 14-some years old now. That's crazy.

 

Good choice. There are some parallels there.

 

Now that I'm finished with the 3rd Day of Honor book in my omnibus it's on to the next one, the original series Day of Honor story.

I'm also still going through my re-read of Enterprise: The First Adventure. For whatever reason I'm finding it less enjoyable than the 1st time I read it (I was a bit disappointed the first time--for what was billed as the first epic Star Trek book I found it kind of meh even then, sorry to say). I'm looking forward to "The Captain's Oath" which will have a different beginning for Captain Kirk's first command. I should be done E:TFA by the time I get it in the mail.

I guess the next novel will be the next Discovery novel "The Enterprise War". I'll have to look at ordering those, though I hope Amazon has a deal on those like they did for the last TNG book and "The Captain's Oath" a while back

 

I’m reading (very slowly) the new Obi Wan novel. Also looking forward to the next TOS book. It never occurred to me that Kirk may have been captain of another ship before the Enterprise. I’m not sure if I like the idea or not.

 

I have to admit, I was taken by surprise a bit. I know I just assumed the Enterprise was his first command. When Dehner said he asked for Mitchell on his first command I just assumed it was the Enterprise.

But "The Making of Star Trek", one of the very first guidebooks to Star Trek, noted Kirk's first command was a destroyer class ship. Even E: TFA noted he was command of such a ship (though she listed his rank as Commander at the time).

Christopher's books are usually good reads so I have to believe he'll make it a good story.

 

If you think about it, it doesn't make sense that Starfleet would give such a big, important ship to a novice captain.