Hmm. Personally, I find current ST fiction to be just a bit too "threaded" for my taste: frequently, I find myself having to leave myself notes on how one book of a multi-book arc ended, just to avoid getting lost, three or four months later, when the next installment of the arc comes out.
The current opus isn't nearly so bad, but still, just getting through the first 40 pages prompted me to look up several things on Memory Beta.
Now, as a fan of Alan Dean Foster's "Humanx Commonwealth" books (and his "Spellsinger" books as well), and of Lyman Frank Baum's 14 canonical "Oz" books, and of Robert Asprin's "Myth-" books, I'm not exactly unfamiliar with the concept of a book-to-book continuity. But you can pick up any "Commonwealth," "Spellsinger" (with the exception of
The Hour of the Gate), "Myth-," or "Oz" book, without intimate knowledge of its immediate antecedents, and not feel like you're being kept in the dark.
By contrast, some 70 pages in, I can't help thinking that there's something I've forgotten about what happened to the Q, and the Omega Continuum, and Eden, and q, at the end of The Eternal Tide, that's essential to understanding the present opus.
Judging by the excerpt, I can tell this is going to be another of those books where I read through it all in one day because it's so good, then get sad immediately afterwards that I didn't stretch it out for longer
388 pages in a day? Who do you think you are? Evelyn Wood?
Looking forward to hearing another interview with Kirsten.
