So what are you reading now (Part 4)?

[Steve Roby]

I've only read one SW book and it made such an impression on me that I cannot remember which one, nor remember anything about it, and swore off reading that tripe until hell freezes over.

ST books are far superior.

There are Star Trek books that could have had the same effect on me if I weren't already addicted. There are some really, incredibly bad Star Trek books out there.

I read Star Trek instead of Star Wars because Star Trek interests me a lot more than Star Wars: the setting, the characters, the situations, all that stuff. I've read a dozen or two Star Wars novels and on average I liked them less than Trek books, but that's to be expected because in general Star Wars is less appealing to me. (Star Wars has better video games, though.)

 

[John Clark]

It's a great book, and the next 5 are equally as brilliant...they're written like Hollywood blockbusters and I can't wait for one to be turned into a film.

I'd have to agree. They are entertaining and I'd see films based on them.

I'm currently reading one of the X-Wing novels, Starfighters of Adumar. As for Star Wars vs Trek books, I used to buy both, but for a little while I felt the Trek ones went down hill. The more recent ones have been great and I've started getting them again. The Star Wars books have gone a bit down hill for me now and I don't think I've read much of the NJO series.

 

[Cap'n Crunch]

I finished The First Peer, the Pride/Romulan story from Seven Deadly Sins. I'm now on the Greed/Ferengi story, Reservoir Ferengi.

 

[Steve Roby]

Reading Andrew Cartmel's Prisoner novel Miss Freedom. Pretty good, though it doesn't play any of the kinds of tricks Thomas Disch's Prisoner novel or Jon Blum and Rupert Booth's The Prisoner's Dilemma do. Instead, it plays it straight as a story of a spy trapped in a strange place. (So far, anyway.) It makes for a grittier, darker story than usual.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Vanguard, in my mind, is the best series of Trek lit running right now. Titan comes a close second, sometimes even rising to #1 depending on the story. Vanguard has been excellent every volume thus far.

Those are my favorites as well. My other choices are the TOS based books, which tend to be stand alones. No TOS relaunch. Too many relaunch points to chose from I guess.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I meant to read either The Buried Age or A Time to be Born this week, but was distracted by a Star Wars novel, Dynasty of Evil.

I've got some good stuff inbound: The Farther Shore, Crucible: McCoy, Provenance of Shadows, and...one of the Enterprise-relaunch novels, the one with Trip on the cover. The name escapes me at the moment.

 

[Reanok]

The Enterprise novel with Trip on the cover is The Good that men do.

 

[Xenu Cruise]

The Enterprise novel with Trip on the cover is The Good that men do.

I take it Trip somehow survived in the novel universe? I can't particular say I'm a fan of the novels "undoing" certain story points done by the TV shows that fans may not have liked.

 

[Steve Roby]

We never saw Trip die in Enterprise. We saw a 24th century holodeck program in which a holodeck version of Trip "dies."

 

[Xenu Cruise]

We never saw Trip die in Enterprise. We saw a 24th century holodeck program in which a holodeck version of Trip "dies."

That's a cop out and everybody knows it. Were Riker and Troi watching some Holonovel based on real characters were Trip just happened to die? Obviously it is meant to be a recreation of what "really" happened. While we were at it, lets bring back Lt. Hawk from First Contact. He was only assimilated, shot, and floated out into space, right? He could have easily bounced back from that.

 

[Christopher]

We never saw Trip die in Enterprise. We saw a 24th century holodeck program in which a holodeck version of Trip "dies."

That's a cop out and everybody knows it.

Of course, but it's a perfectly valid one and it does not conflict with canon in the slightest. Heck, even in the holoprogram, we never actually saw Trip die; we saw him seriously wounded and going into the medical scanner, and then we saw other characters reacting as though he were dead. So we only have indirect evidence of his death. Even within the parameters of the holoprogram itself, there's a potential out. It's the standard rule of fiction: if you don't see a body, they're not necessarily dead. (I imagine that the writers of the finale deliberately structured it that way to give themselves a way of resurrecting Trip if they ever wanted to. That's standard practice in series storytelling: leave yourself an out just in case your plans change.)

Were Riker and Troi watching some Holonovel based on real characters were Trip just happened to die? Obviously it is meant to be a recreation of what "really" happened.

But it is just a recreation, a fictional interpretation of a historical event, and such things are often inaccurate for any number of reasons, whether deliberate revisionism or failures of research. History is never a perfectly accurate representation of the past. No single source can be trusted absolutely, because there is always inaccuracy and bias in any account.

The novel The Good That Men Do explains why the holoprogram Riker watched was inaccurate.

While we were at it, lets bring back Lt. Hawk from First Contact. He was only assimilated, shot, and floated out into space, right? He could have easily bounced back from that.

If someone came up with a worthwhile story explaining how he were rescued, then as long as it did not contradict anything onscreen, it would be allowable. Of course it could be quite gimmicky if handled poorly, but that's a separate issue.

Of course, that's a very poor analogy for this, because we did actually see Hawk get shot. That was a firsthand, primary account of that event. We have no such firsthand account of Trip Tucker's death; all we saw was a holoprogram made two centuries later. That's what makes it so easy to retcon.

 

[BrotherBenny]

Besides the fact that the episode itself is universally hated. Maybe 1 in 10,000 Star Trek fans liked it, if that.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I would have preferred the producers stuck to their original plan and did the Demons/Terra Prime story arc as three episodes instead of two. The only reasons they changed the plan is because Enterprise had been cancelled. I think the idea of the Coalition of Planets is a great one and I think that Archer's speech should have been the end to Enterprise:

"Up until about 100 years ago, there was one question that burned in every human, that made us study the stars and dream of traveling to them. Are we alone? Our generation is privileged to know the answer to that question. We are all explorers driven to know what's over the horizon, what's beyond our own shores. And yet the more I've experienced, the more I've learned that no matter how far we travel, or how fast we get there, the most profound discoveries are not necessarily beyond that next star. They're within us, woven into the threads that bind us, all of us, to each other. A final frontier begins in this hall. Let's explore it together..."

 

[Joel_Kirk]

With Ender, I feel like the only really good ones are Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. But someone else'll probably show up and disagree with me.

With Ender, I feel like the only really good ones are Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. But someone else'll probably show up and disagree with me.

Speaker for the Dead is, I think, the best of the Ender series, though I must confess that I read only through Children of the Mind, not because Orson Scott Card is a racist, homophobic, religiously intolerant bigot and fascist but because I didn't enjoy either Xenocide or Children. By the time the sidequel series began, I had decided that I could no longer, in good conscience, support Card by buying his work.

I liked the first four Ender books okay, but the ones with Bean just struck me as too implausible and self-referential. I mean, a book where the protagonist is a 4-year-old Macchiavellian supergenius? Come on. And I didn't have much interest in filling in the gaps in a story that had already been told, and told better.

Orson Scott Card is a racist, homophobic, religiously intolerant bigot and fascist

And he declared his work to be superior to Star Trek.

Storm From The Shadows....an Honorverse book.

I'm still debating on whether or not I should delve into those huge ass books....

And that kind of gets into my debate on what to read in the immediate future:

Ender novels...or the Foundation novel series....?

Then there is 'Mutiny on the Enterprise' again...and other non-sci-fi novels I just acquired that are lying about....

The Honor Harrington series and related Honorverse books are very good, but you have to like military sci fi and political discussions both to enjoy them fully. Weber really does like politics and his space battle descriptions are second to none. If you do get into these books, start with the first Honor book (On Basilisk Station) and work your way through them as its a continuing story.

I have not read the Ender books (I have several, but unread so far), but have heard they are really good.

Foundation is excellent, but not my all time favorite, although I thought Foundation and Earth was pretty cool.

You might check out the Dune books if you haven't already. Great stuff.

Thanks for the comments....

You guys haven't made things easier because now I'm going to have to see for myself how the books read. (Ender books, Foundation books, and maybe the first Honorverse book).

And yes, Frank Herbert is on my list as well...

However, right now I'm reading a non-sci-fi book, 'Midnight/Sunshine' by Kelvin L. Reed; after that is a Marjorie Liu short story called 'Six.' (The Liu story is to give me an idea of how she structures her paranormal romance)...

 

[Xenu Cruise]

Of course, that's a very poor analogy for this, because we did actually see Hawk get shot. That was a firsthand, primary account of that event. We have no such firsthand account of Trip Tucker's death; all we saw was a holoprogram made two centuries later. That's what makes it so easy to retcon.

I guess my problem isn't with how it was done, but why it was done. For whatever reason, TPTB decided that Trip should die. No matter how poorly it was handled, that was their call to make. Retconing it really kills the intention of the episode. Everybody knows that many people were pissed about Kirk's death in Generations and Shatner's ego brought him back in some weird non-canon from the non-canon book universe. Was it the good story idea that brought Trip back or the sourpuss fans? If it was the fans that the Trek universe will turn in the Marvel/DC comic book universe where nobody is really concerned when a fan favorite dies because they will always come back. I'm still half expecting Janeway to return in the near future.

 

[kkozoriz1]

Part of me is hoping that Anna Sandesjo from Vanguard is really dead but I have a terrible feeling that she isn't.

 

[Christopher]

I guess my problem isn't with how it was done, but why it was done. For whatever reason, TPTB decided that Trip should die. No matter how poorly it was handled, that was their call to make. Retconing it really kills the intention of the episode. Everybody knows that many people were pissed about Kirk's death in Generations and Shatner's ego brought him back in some weird non-canon from the non-canon book universe. Was it the good story idea that brought Trip back or the sourpuss fans?

It was then-editor Margaret Clark. As soon as she saw the episode, she was unhappy with the outcome and saw the obvious way to bring Trip back, and she believed there was a story worth telling there. And, surprisingly, CBS Licensing had no objection to her proposal, presumably because the series was done and they had other licensed properties to focus on.

 

[JD]

Part of me is hoping that Anna Sandesjo from Vanguard is really dead but I have a terrible feeling that she isn't.

How detailed was her death scene? I remember her ship was destroyed, but really nothing more than that.

 

[kkozoriz1]

All seen from the observation deck on Vanguard.

 

[Leandar]

We never saw Trip die in Enterprise. We saw a 24th century holodeck program in which a holodeck version of Trip "dies."

That's a cop out and everybody knows it.

Of course, but it's a perfectly valid one and it does not conflict with canon in the slightest. Heck, even in the holoprogram, we never actually saw Trip die; we saw him seriously wounded and going into the medical scanner, and then we saw other characters reacting as though he were dead. So we only have indirect evidence of his death. Even within the parameters of the holoprogram itself, there's a potential out. It's the standard rule of fiction: if you don't see a body, they're not necessarily dead. (I imagine that the writers of the finale deliberately structured it that way to give themselves a way of resurrecting Trip if they ever wanted to. That's standard practice in series storytelling: leave yourself an out just in case your plans change.)

Didn't Berman himself later say that if the series had been extended, that would have been rewritten to establish that he didn't die?

 

[Xenu Cruise]

Part of me is hoping that Anna Sandesjo from Vanguard is really dead but I have a terrible feeling that she isn't.

Awww....I just started reading the Vanguard series. I guess it is impossible to avoid all spoilers.