So What Are you Reading?: Generations

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Now more than halfway through Captain to Captain (GC's "Legacies" entry).

While GC's Una fits Majel's Una quite well, I think it fits Rebecca's even better.

His April-and-crew is of course Diane Carey's April-and-crew.

 

[Greg Cox]

Now more than halfway through Captain to Captain (GC's "Legacies" entry).

While GC's Una fits Majel's Una quite well, I think it fits Rebecca's even better.

His April-and-crew is of course Diane Carey's April-and-crew.

Which is funny because I wrote that book before Una appeared on DISCO.

But, yes, I very much followed Carey's lead with regards to April and his crew.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Which is funny because I wrote that book before Una appeared on DISCO.

Yes. Given lead times and release dates, probably before they started shooting DSC. Maybe before it was even in pre-production. Which is why I found the fit with Rebecca's Una so surprising and noteworthy.

 

[KRAD]

Oh yeah, the Legacies trilogy was conceived and written in 2015 and early 2016. Discovery didn't debut until 2017, and we didn't see Pike and Number One on the show until 2019.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Lt. Emmett? Durganian refugees?

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I'm now not quite a third of the way through Purgatory's Key.

I was going to ask something, earlier in my trek through the TrekLit from the SNW era (or involving SNW characters). At one point, I think it was either in The Rift or in one of the first two Legacies novels (and I'm leaning towards The Rift, because it seems like something PD would do), I saw a direct quote of Han Solo's line from The Empire Strikes Back, "This one goes here, that one goes there." Am I correct in assuming that was a very deliberate homage, for comic relief?

 

[John Clark]

MASH - by Richard Hooker.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

The Gift of Faith by Kristen McKanagh

 

[Daddy Todd]

TOS #41: The Three-Minute Universe by Barbara Paul.

 

[somebuddyX]

Ha! I just bought ten books for my dad off ebay and then looking at another group of eleven books I see part of it is the Invasion! book set, all eleven for $31.47. I recently spent $50 just for that book set alone!

 

[Reanok]

Death by Beach read by Eva Gates

 

[Lord Hierarch]

Finished To Brave the Storm.

A brisker pace than BRW, and more enjoyable.

There is a little more action. Nice character interaction.

 

[John Clark]

Started on The Gray Man by Mark Graeney.

 

[Daddy Todd]

In addition to Three-Minute Universe, I'm dipping my toes into Odysseus Wept, what has been announced as Powys Media's final Space: 1999 novel.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Just finished Purgatory's Key this morning.

The whole trilogy was definitely worth the re-read. But not without some problems.

Kind of unsatisfying, that none of the exiled Usildar appear to have made it back. Kind of puzzling, that Edolon somehow made it to Usilde at the end, without apparent explanation.

Also found at least one glaring continuity error that a TOS-aware copy editor should have caught: it was Kirk, McCoy, Scott, and Uhura who visited the MU, not Kirk, Spock, Scott, and Uhura.

And speaking of copy-editing, I vaguely recall seeing at least one typo in which either "Uslide" was misspelled as "Uslide," or "Usildar" was misspelled as "Uslidar." (Given the Jatohr anatomy and means of locomotion, the misspelled "Uslide" would make perfect sense . . . for them.)

 

[bdub76]

Finished Never Ending Sacrifice last night. It was good. But I didn’t want a happy ending. I was expecting an ending like All Quiet on the Western Front as the book gave off anti-war vibes.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

After re-reading the Legacies trilogy, the next logical step was Brad Ferguson's Crisis on Centaurus: much of the Legacies Trilogy takes place on Centaurus, using locations established by Ferguson, who had also been the one to establish that Joanna McCoy was a University student in New Athens.

I will first note that with the present level of terrorism in the world considerably -- perhaps astronomically -- higher than it was back in the mid-1980s, when Ferguson wrote Crisis on Centaurus (consider that back then, you didn't have metal detectors at the gates of Disneyland or Hollywood Bowl!), I'm finding his tale of the aftermath of a terrorist group detonating an antimatter weapon at a busy spaceport more than a bit hard to read.

But of more interest is the level of direct, irreconcilable difference in the way McCoy's relationship with his daughter is portrayed in the Legacies Trilogy, vs. the way it is portrayed in Crisis on Centaurus. My take on this is, why reference what Ferguson established at all, if you're going to contradict most of the details?

 

[Christopher]

My take on this is, why reference what Ferguson established at all, if you're going to contradict most of the details?

Why adapt Frankenstein or Who Censored Roger Rabbit? or Marvel's Civil War if you're going to tell a radically different story? Why did Strange New Worlds borrow Una's Illyrian backstory from Vulcan's Glory while contradicting it by making it a secret, and by calling her Una instead of treating "Number One" as her actual name? Because adaptation isn't mere copying. It's taking elements from past works and putting them together in new ways. You can take elements from multiple contradictory versions of a universe and mix and match them, the way the Marvel Cinematic Universe blends elements from the main and Ultimate continuities, say. The goal is not to "fit" with the continuity of an earlier work, but to mine it for the elements that are useful to your own story, and to pay tribute to its ideas.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Enola Holmes and the Elegant Escapade, the eighth novel in Nancy Springer's series about Enola Holmes, the much younger sister of Sherlock Holmes.

I wrote about the seventh book a few weeks ago. That novel, The Black Barouche, was the first in about a decade and the first since the Netflix film series began. It was a novel that didn't depend on the reader's knowledge of the first six books, and also a novel that someone who had only seen the Netflix films would be able to pick up and read without finding anything particularly jarring. The Elegant Escapade, by contrast, is the third in a sequence of stories involving Enola and Lady Cecily Alastair (first, The Case of the Left-Handed Lady, the second, The Case of the Peculiar Pink Fan), and, while quickly summarized in about two paragraphs in the prologue, a little familiarity with Enola's past adventures is helpful.

Lady Cecily, the daughter of baronet Sir Eustace Alastair, has, in previous books, been kidnapped before she was to be presented (so she's now seen as "soiled goods" and won't be presented to society) and, against her will, was attempted to be sold off in marriage to a cousin. Now, her father has locked her in her room until he can arrange another marriage for her and, after Enola attempts to visit and is rebuffed, she escapes the family home in London. Enola now looks for Lady Cecily while trying to keep her brother, Sherlock Holmes, from also finding her, because Enola is certain that her brother will return Lady Cecily to her beastly father...

Some Sherlock Holmes stories are mysteries. Some Sherlock Holmes stories are excuses for Sherlock to run around and do stuff. The Elegant Escapade -- and the connection of the title to the plot frankly escapes me -- is one of the latter. There's nothing here to solve, except where did Lady Cecily go and how will she escape her father's malign clutches. If The Black Barouche was a team-up book between Enola and Sherlock, this is more of a solo Enola story; Sherlock is present, but he's very much a supporting character and he doesn't do much to push the story to its conclusion. In an odd sort of way, he functions a bit like Enola's Watson -- as a sounding board and conscience -- though Enola also develops her own ally who helps to force a conclusion to the problem and offer a solution.

Spoiler

One thing really bothered me -- The Black Barouche and The Elegant Escapade essentially end the same way. The villain has done something to a young woman, and Enola's solution both times to free the young woman from his clutches is to blackmail him with evidence of various perfidies. In both cases, Sherlock tells her not to do it, she does it anyway, and even though he says he won't be a party to it he watches with brotherly glee as she does. I get it, Victorian society sucked for women, and the law bound them to situations that were difficult to escape from. Social embarrassment--shitty men not wanting their dirty laundry aired--is, in these stories, a way for Enola to help damaged women out of their bad situations. It was an interesting play once. I don't really like it as Enola's go-to solution, because it could backfire on her badly.

If you've not read an Enola Holmes book, this probably is not the one to start with. But it's pleasant enough, a book that runs on the characters more than the plot.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Why adapt Frankenstein or Who Censored Roger Rabbit?

I freely admit that I haven't read Frankenstein, and that the only adaptations I have any experience with are the two (a movie and a stage musical) about Victor's grandson, Frederick, a pop-eyed assistant with a strangely mobile hump on his back, and a zipper-necked monster with an enormous schwanzstucker. Oh, yes, and those versions have a happy ending.

As to Who Censored Roger Rabbit, well, I have read that, and according to everything I've read about it, Gary Wolf liked Disney's version so much better than his own that he wrote sequels to it, and formally deprecated his own original. And I don't blame him one bit for doing so.

As to what you didn't mention, i.e., my favorite target of derision among all film adaptations of speculative fiction, I maintain that MGM's ham-handed monkeying with Baum's most famous opus was a mix of pointless changes for the sake of Technicolor appeal, and intentional dumbing-down of the whole premise of the story. And I wouldn't be nearly so pissed about it if it didn't create a "tail-wagging-the-dog" situation.

But Star Trek doesn't (with the exception of the Abramsverse) generally involve reboots or reinterpretations of prior works. It's one big happy (albeit far from seamless) continuity. This was particularly true of the long-running Novelverse that was brought to a heroic end not all that long ago, to make room for PIC, but really, even at the peak of Richard Arnold's reign of terror, it was still a single continuity.

In the case of Una's Illyrian heritage, of course it had to be retconned as something that was kept quiet, in order to harmonize it with the Federation-wide Augment-phobia that was established in DS9:"Dr. Bashir, I Presume" as continuing into the TNG/DS9/VOY era. (I will note that Jenniver Aristeides, from Vonda's The Entropy Effect would have a much more difficult time being so harmonized!) But really, having just read every bit of prose TrekLit involving Una (except the NF novels that don't quite openly declare that she's Morgan Primus), I can safely say that the discontinuities with Una aren't really any worse than the ones that had started appearing in canon ST since before Rand was written out.

The main story of the Legacies trilogy has to have happened before the main story of Crisis on Centaurus: after the very first chapter of Crisis, most of New Athens was a glassy, radioactive, crater. And yet Legacies somehow feels like it happened after Crisis.

At any rate, most of the continuity problems that kind of jumped out at me were things that seemed as pointless as the proverbial "ruby slippers" of the MGM Oz, e.g., what story point could possibly have been served by Joanna being raised by her mother and estranged from her father, with no trace of Ferguson's easy "Hiya Squirt"/"You big mushball, don't get sloppy on me" familiarity?