Spoilers TOS: Identity Theft by Greg Cox Review Thread

[thribs]

Just finished it. A nice enjoyable adventure focusing on Chekov. What we need now is a spin off focusing on those treasure hunters. I hope they find the treasure they are seeking.
Also, was I the only one imagining something like this when describing the Voyrz?

Probably shouldn't have watched Zootropolis 2 before reading.

 

[ace2k]

Also, was I the only one imagining something like this when describing the Voyrz?

Probably shouldn't have watched Zootropolis 2 before reading.

Actually, I did imagine something like this. Thank goodness I wasn’t the only one!

 

[Turtletrekker]

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[Procutus]

What we need now is a spin off focusing on those treasure hunters. I hope they find the treasure they are seeking.

Second that motion!

 

[Greg Cox]

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Thanks for sharing this!

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Actually, I have an old friend, whose wife is a cartoonist. She does their Christmas cards, caricaturing the family as a family of reindeer.

So far as I can recall, ST has never had a cervid civilization.

Hmm. The reviewer has a Cerritos uniform!

I'm about 40 pages shy of halfway through. Not quite sure whether the J in Ryjo is intended to be pronounced as a German J, an English J, or a Spanish J. Or whether the Y has a long-I, long-E, or some other sound.

 

[Christopher]

So far as I can recall, ST has never had a cervid civilization.

The Choblik, one of the species I created for the Titan novels, are somewhat cervine. https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/torvig1.jpg

 

[Greg Cox]

Actually, I have an old friend, whose wife is a cartoonist. She does their Christmas cards, caricaturing the family as a family of reindeer.

So far as I can recall, ST has never had a cervid civilization.

Hmm. The reviewer has a Cerritos uniform!

I'm about 40 pages shy of halfway through. Not quite sure whether the J in Ryjo is intended to be pronounced as a German J, an English J, or a Spanish J. Or whether the Y has a long-I, long-E, or some other sound.

In my head, it was pronounced "Rie-Joe."

Although he was "Rylo" the whole time I was writing the book -- until I decided that Rylo sounded too similar to Sulu, whom he had many scenes with. So I changed it to Ryjo at the last minutes.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

The Choblik, one of the species I created for the Titan novels, are somewhat cervine.

I had forgotten about them, and now that I've been reminded of them, and I've seen your sketch, I can see some cervine features. Although their most characteristic feature is that they're not only bipedal, but bipodal by number of limbs (are they tetrapodal by ancestry?)

Although he was "Rylo" the whole time I was writing the book -- until I decided that Rylo sounded too similar to Sulu, whom he had many scenes with. So I changed it to Ryjo at the last minutes.

Not to mention sounding rather like a planet that figures rather prominently in The Last Starfighter. (And yes, that was the very first thing that popped into my head when I read the above text. I have fond memories of that movie.)

 

[thribs]

Could have called him Kylo. That would have been funny.

 

[Christopher]

I had forgotten about them, and now that I've been reminded of them, and I've seen your sketch, I can see some cervine features. Although their most characteristic feature is that they're not only bipedal, but bipodal by number of limbs (are they tetrapodal by ancestry?)

No reason they would be, necessarily. They're aliens, so there's no reason they'd have to follow a similar evolutionary path to Earthly life. Okay, in the Trek universe there's the whole "Progenitors seeding DNA" thing explaining convergent evolution, but I based several of the aliens in Orion's Hounds on concepts from my original fiction. I've featured bipodal aliens before (is that the word for it?) in my Analog story "Among the Wild Cybers of Cybele," and the Choblik are loosely based on an unused alien design for a stilt-legged bipodal runner that was somewhat inspired by the Landstriders from The Dark Crystal, though I added a cervine head and made the legs shorter. (I was originally going for something headless that just had eyes and a mouth on the front of the body, with a "hand" on the tail for bringing food up to the mouth, but I decided that was evolutionarily implausible.)

I figure that on a lower-gravity planet, organisms might not need four limbs to support their weight, just as on a high-gravity planet, they might need six limbs or more. In "Wild Cybers," I came up with various alternate adaptations to do the job of forelimbs, like prehensile trunks or mobile rib extensions.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I've featured bipodal aliens before (is that the word for it?)

I'm not a biological taxonomist (and neither do I play one on televison); "bipod"/"bipodal" is merely my best extrapolation, in the absence of any other term I could find, from something I saw in (I think) a natural history museum, about nearly every land animal and amphibian being in a clade of tetrapods, because all of them either normally have four limbs, or (in the case of snakes and legless lizards) had ancestors with four limbs.

 

[Ronald Held]

No reason the Preservers seeded every planet in the galaxy. Maybe they deliberately missed some?