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So What Are you Reading?: Generations

Doc Savage: The Thousand-headed Man by Kenneth Robeson (Lester Dent).

I took a Doc break last week to read Starlost Unauthorized And the Quest for Canadian Identity By D.G. Valdron. Like the series it’s about, the book is kind of a ramshackle mess - typos galore, copious repetition of material (sometimes on the same page) but it presents the interesting premise of the subtitle. Namely, the series is best understood as part of Canada’s 1970s search for a national identity. It also counters some of Harlan Ellison’s hyperbolic criticism of the series. And with the recent publication of TLDV, with Joe Straczynski’s long “exegesis” of Ellison in that book, it feels like the right time to look at The Starlost and how it fits into Ellison’s body of work.
 
I actually got that job because the Star Trek editor at the time, John Ordover, knew that I was also hugely into vampires and werewolves, so I guess it seemed like a good fit. Ended up novelizing the first three UW movies and writing one prequel novel as well. Even got to attend the red-carpet Hollywood premiere of the first film, which doesn't usually happen when you write a movie novelization.
I do own all the Underworld books - at least the three movie-novelizations, as well as a tie-in novel called "Blutfeind" - at least, that's the German title. The english one is "blood enemy", so the translation is perfect.^^
 
I had skipped Fallen Gods before, and I am reading it now because there will be no new Titan novels for the foreseeable future. I'm almost 70% done, and it still feels like a drag to read it. It's shorter than Seize the Fire, at least.

More entertaining is rereading the issues in the first Amazing Spider-Man omnibus volume. The hit-to-miss ratio for characters who would stand the test of time in those initial issues is incredible. In #2-4, you get Vulture, then Doc Ock, then Sandman.
 
Now about 100 pages into The Case of the Colonist's Corpse, and the murder hasn't happened yet. I'd forgotten just how profoundly unlikable most of the characters are: self-centered, greedy, elitist, or more than one of the above. I see entirely too much of that in the evening news.

I can see why none of the detective fiction in my library is of the "police procedural," "hard-boiled," or "legal procedural" subgenres, and very little is of the "murder whodunit" subgenre. I have the complete canonical Sherlock Holmes (surprisingly few murders) and the complete Bobbsey Twins (no murders at all, given that it's a children's detective series).

If we had a review thread on it, I'd be looking at giving it a "below average." Easy to see why Ingersoll and Isabella weren't asked to do another Sam Cogley mystery.

*******

An hour later:

The victim was finally murdered. And then things picked up. Kirk and the Enterprise were tapped to transport Cogley -- and Shaw -- to the colony.

But still, 100 pages of the interactions of not-very-nice people as a prologue . . .
 
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The reddeng by Adam Neville.

And I want to go back reading DS9 books
Has anyone read the Millennium Trilogy? Are they good?
They are a little bit expensive so I am not sure If I want to take the chance
 
The reddeng by Adam Neville.

And I want to go back reading DS9 books
Has anyone read the Millennium Trilogy? Are they good?
They are a little bit expensive so I am not sure If I want to take the chance
The Millennium books are really great, right up there with Federation and Prime Directive by the same authors. They did an omnibus edition in both print and ebook form, so check on both that and the single volumes to see what gives you the better price. Here in the US, the ebook of the collection is $10, compared to $9 each for the individual books. They have gone on sale occasionally from Simon & Schuster's monthly deals. The print versions are long out of print, so it's just luck of the draw there.

I am now starting my reread of A Pocket Full of Lies.
 
They're also quite long, roughly the same aggregate length as The Lord of the Rings. And it's been so long that I haven't a clue what they're about, or whether they're worth the time to re-read them (I'll defer to @Smiley on that).

I finished The Case of the Colonist's Corpse last night. If there were a review/poll thread, I'd give the 80-odd pages of exposition covering just how nasty the suspects were a "poor," and the rest of the novel an "average."

I've now dug out my copy of Oz-Story #6 (the final issue), and I'm re-reading Hugh Pendexter's "Oz and the Three Witches." Not "revisionist Oz" (for which I've made no secret of my utter contempt), but retconning Oz: It attempts to explain (with some success) one of Baum's own contradictions.

In the Baum canon, the first book left it ambiguous (whether by design or otherwise) whether it was a fairy tale or a dream-fantasy. This was a much less litigious era about intellectual property rights (especially where children's literature was concerned), and so story ideas were freely given and freely received. Baum's readers, by the time he'd gotten a few more children's books under his belt, convinced him to write another Oz book (The Land of Oz, the only canonical Oz book in which Dorothy made no appearance). While this didn't entirely settle the question of whether Oz was "in-universe real" or just the dream of a bored Kansas farm-girl, it came down hard on the "in-universe real" side. It also established that the rightful ruler of Oz was a girl named Ozma, who had been transformed into a boy named Tip, the slave of a witch named Mombi. This led to reader letters asking for a return of Dorothy (which Baum accommodated in Ozma of Oz). Then readers started begging for a return of the Wizard, and even though he was said to be complicit in Ozma's transformation and enslavement, he came back, with all forgiven (albeit with no in-universe explanation), in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz.

Pendexter's short story explains (successfully, I would say) why all was forgiven.
 
The Millennium books are really great, right up there with Federation and Prime Directive by the same authors. They did an omnibus edition in both print and ebook form, so check on both that and the single volumes to see what gives you the better price. Here in the US, the ebook of the collection is $10, compared to $9 each for the individual books. They have gone on sale occasionally from Simon & Schuster's monthly deals. The print versions are long out of print, so it's just luck of the draw there.

I am now starting my reread of A Pocket Full of Lies.

Thanks for your advise!
I dont know the writers, haven't read any of their books

I am from the Netherlands, so the omnibus book cost between 25 and 30 Euro.
Because a update problem with my ereader I can't get books on it, so I am looking for paper books.
 
Inspired by the research I did to find a novel "X" for the "A to Z" thread, I'm re-reading the long-forgotten Death of a Neutron Star.

If there were a review thread for it, I'd give it an "average." And I wonder if the wonderful, novel coffee that keeps getting mentioned is more than just Janeway's obsession with the stuff, and perhaps more like a "Chekhov's Coffee Pot" that will eventually become crucial to the plot.
 
Right now I'm re-reading my Fanfic to try to get rid of some grammatical and orthographical errors - and I'm re-reading some of the other stories, I wrote with the exact same goal. Self-beta-reading is hard. ^^
 
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