Okay, I understand where you're coming from now.
Honestly? Same. I recognize the comedic talent involved and the quality of the program, but Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm aren't for me. (Same with It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.)
Worst Trek book?
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Okay, I understand where you're coming from now.
Honestly? Same. I recognize the comedic talent involved and the quality of the program, but Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm aren't for me. (Same with It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.)
I saw Curb Your Enthusiasm exactly once. I had none to curb. What ever happened to sitcoms about nice people?
There are still plenty of being made. In just the past ten years, there have been sitcoms like Community, New Girl, Blockbuster, Brooklyn 99, Mystic Quest, Grace and Frankie, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, The Good Place, One Day at a Time, Modern Family, Abbott Elementary, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Only Murders in the Building (not sure if that counts as a sitcom?), Ghosts, Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, Selfie, Big Mouth, Bob's Burgers, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, How I Met Your Mother, iCarly (revival), and plenty more.
I'm not sure I'd agree that The Good Place is a sitcom about nice people. It's more a sitcom about broken, screwed-up people trying to become nice people.
I'm sure there are objectively worse ST books, but my experience reading "Across the Universe" was the most frustrating experience I've had to date of reading a ST book. It starts with the description of a generational ship voyage (actually interestingly rendered, focusing as it does on the pure filth, degradation and despair that takes hold onboard when plans go awry). But....then the passengers are resettled on a planet and they become more or less generic colonists, their backstory mostly irrelevant. The writers appear to have had in mind some kind of immigration allegory, given the desperate ship backstory and the fact that once resettled the passengers are willing to do the (quite literal) gardening that the original colonists are not willing to do. But then this is abandoned and the passengers act and fight in a manner indistinguishable from that of the original colonists. Two different Jeeps fall into crevasses in the planet's surface in back-to-back scenes. Hare-brained stratagems are given Spock's blessing as likely to succeed.
The thing that frustrates me most of all is that the book was published in 1999. This was not the wacky 1970s, with well-placed fans sneaking their slash fiction and Ayn Rand fixations into the Star Trek idiom (the results of which at least have their charms as oddities). This was professional writers, editors and publishers working within the boundaries of well-established IP, and doing so with the evident belief that so long as it says "Star Trek" on the cover, someone will buy it. I am frustrated that that someone was me.
(In their defense, Wiki informs me that the authors had in mind a very different story, but it was nixed by their editor. So perhaps my frustration is a bit misplaced. As I am already beginning to feel guilty for writing the above, I'll give one of their other TOS efforts a second chance.)
I enjoy the Marshak and Culbreath books, because they're so totally insane. It's the same kind of enjoyment I get from Gold Key comics, I guess but about a hundred times more homoerotic
“The Fate of the Phoenix” was the first original Trek novel I read, after the TMP novelization and numerous Blish volumes throughout 1980. Until then, my knowledge of Trek was limited to a handful of TOS and TAS.
Thanks to “Star Trek Lives!” I was able to get a handle on what Marshak & Culbreath were aiming for. All four of their original novels would be hard going today, I fear. I do appreciate what they did to bring fanfic to the forefront with the two volumes of short stories, “The New Voyages”.
I actually had a lot of trouble finding “The Price of the Phoenix”, so I read “Fate” first and eventually had to settle for a secondhand Corgi UK edition of “Price”. It also took me a while to track down “The Enterprise Incident” episode, which would have been fortuitous backstory.
I think Chidi, Jason, and Janet were always nice people (even when they were screwed up in other ways), even if Eleanor, Tahani, or Michael weren't.
Well...
As I recall, Chidi's arc was discovering that, although he tried to be a nice person, he actually had a toxic effect on the people around him, which is why he was in the Bad Place. As for Jason, he was likeable in some ways, but he was a criminal and did some pretty bad things.
As for Janet, I think she'd say "Not a person." To start with, she was merely a database acting as she was programmed, so she was neither nice nor nasty. She gradually became a person.
And there were certainly tons of nasty people around the main cast, doing awful things to them. What fascinated me about TGP is that in some ways it's incredibly cynical, portraying the afterlife as this broken, Brazil-like dystopia of negligence where absolutely nobody avoids eternal damnation, yet at the same time it's remarkably positive and life-affirming. It's both nasty and nice at the same time, which is part of what makes it so extraordinary.
As for Janet, I think she'd say "Not a person." To start with, she was merely a database acting as she was programmed, so she was neither nice nor nasty. She gradually became a person.
And there were certainly tons of nasty people around the main cast, doing awful things to them. What fascinated me about TGP is that in some ways it's incredibly cynical, portraying the afterlife as this broken, Brazil-like dystopia of negligence where absolutely nobody avoids eternal damnation, yet at the same time it's remarkably positive and life-affirming. It's both nasty and nice at the same time, which is part of what makes it so extraordinary.
Well, I think we're just not going to agree on this. I contend that they were all nice people, even if they were deeply flawed.
I also contend that the afterlife's system of judgment was incapable of accurately judging humans' morality and that neither Chidi nor Jason deserved to go to the Bad Place. In my view, the Afterlife was itself morally illegitimate until Michael's, Eleanor's, and Chidi's reforms.
I do agree with this 100%.
It's not disagreement, it's just that you're defining the question too granularly. It's not about whether you like individuals, it's about defining the approach the show took to its characters collectively and the world they occupied. The phrase "sitcoms about nice people" implies an overall approach of optimism and positivity in how the series is written, something in the vein of The Andy Griffith Show, say. The Good Place is a lot edgier and more ambiguous than that, its characters more multilayered.
Not just "The Andy Griffith Show"; I was thinking more of the Norman Lear shows (Archie Bunker was neither an asshole nor an idiot: just shockingly ignorant), the Grant Tinker/MTM shows (even Phyllis Lindstrom had redeeming qualities), the Garry Marshall shows, M*A*S*H, WKRP, Barney Miller, Welcome Back Kotter, and Night Court.
I gave this some leeway, thinking it would be a brief side tangent, but it appears to be continuing. Let's please return to the subject of "worst" Star Trek books. The merits of various TV shows can be argued in the Science Fiction & Fantasy or TV & Media forums.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Worst Star Trek book? The comic book Shaxs' Best Day, which was released last week. I get that it's supposed to be comedic, but the humor was more in the style of Looney Tunes than Lower Decks. The writer's comments on every page (a gimmick repeated from the Lower Decks miniseries) were also out of place and rarely funny. I lost count of the number of times the word "fascist" was used in the story. While the Red Path followers were definitely fascists, the constant use of the word reeks of the so-called anti-fascist movement, which consists mostly of far-left extremists using that word to demonize anyone slightly more conservative than them. Kind of like the fascists they claim to hate.
I took it more in the vein of "tie-in writer leans too hard onto a word the character has said on the show".
It is the nature of extremism to misapply moderate terms, like "conservative" and "liberal" (which, when properly used, aren't mutually exclusive): they label themselves with one, in order to make their extreme point of view appear moderate and reasonable, and then label everybody else with the other, in order to demonize the term, and demonize everybody outside their extreme. This happens because the worst enemy of any extreme point of view is not the opposite extreme, but the center.
But that's veering even more violently off-topic than the tangent about "sitcoms about nice people" as opposed to "sitcoms about assholes."
I've actually already said my on-topic piece here, but to reiterate and summarize:
1: Una McCormack's Last Best Hope is not even remotely the worst by any reasonably objective standard; it is simply too much of a downer, about too utterly hopeless a situation (not even the CODA trilogy was that depressing), for me to ever want to re-read it; that's what the assignment to write a Picard Season 1 prequel novel called for, and she delivered.
2. Jeter's Warped is objectively bad (and my only recollection about his other ST opus is that it wasn't anything to write home about either), but it's not even remotely "the worst."
3. I've never encountered anything worse than M&C's Phoenix books, although when every other Bantam ST title was a variation on "Kirk & co. go mucking about with things they don't understand" some of them, like the ever-popular Devil World, come close. As do M&C's Pocket titles.
*** later ***
4. I probably despise Section 31 books (and episodes) in general even more than I do the "Phoenix" books, but (as with LBH) not because they're intrinsically bad, but simply because I intensely dislike the subject matter. (And the arc leading up to Leland's well-deserved demise particularly, because it manages to combine Section 31 with a particularly nasty "eye-scream.")
But that's veering even more violently off-topic than the tangent about "sitcoms about nice people" as opposed to "sitcoms about assholes."
I've actually already said my on-topic piece here, but to reiterate and summarize:
1: Una McCormack's Last Best Hope is not even remotely the worst by any reasonably objective standard; it is simply too much of a downer, about too utterly hopeless a situation (not even the CODA trilogy was that depressing), for me to ever want to re-read it; that's what the assignment to write a Picard Season 1 prequel novel called for, and she delivered.
2. Jeter's Warped is objectively bad (and my only recollection about his other ST opus is that it wasn't anything to write home about either), but it's not even remotely "the worst."
3. I've never encountered anything worse than M&C's Phoenix books, although when every other Bantam ST title was a variation on "Kirk & co. go mucking about with things they don't understand" some of them, like the ever-popular Devil World, come close. As do M&C's Pocket titles.
*** later ***
4. I probably despise Section 31 books (and episodes) in general even more than I do the "Phoenix" books, but (as with LBH) not because they're intrinsically bad, but simply because I intensely dislike the subject matter. (And the arc leading up to Leland's well-deserved demise particularly, because it manages to combine Section 31 with a particularly nasty "eye-scream.")
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Going back to my thoughts on Deny thy Father, I think another reason why I was so frustrated by it was that I usually like the author’s work - I’ve been positive on his other Trek books, as well as his Angel ones. It ultimately was an issue with the choice of subject - I do not find Kyle Riker a character worth caring about, and so much of that book asks me to.
Also gonna cast a vote in the direction of much of Diane Carey’s works, for all the usual reasons, though while I could sit here and complain about how Ship of the Line is a sequel to about thirty seconds of an episode it actively contradicts, I want to shout out the way that the Descent novelization seems to actively undermine Crusher’s storyline, where Jeri Taylor wanted Crusher in the command chair to both utilize her some more and test the waters for a woman in the captain’s chair, while Carey seems to want to shove her out of that spotlight, not just by having her part in the episode end with her thinking she’s best suited for staying in Sickbay, but even an early added scene where Crusher talks about taking up knitting for no apparent reason.
Like I think about how Carey treats the women in her stories, and there does feel like this uncomfortable level of “stay in the kitchen while the men do the work” - the Piper duology and Fire Ship aside, how much of a role do the female characters from the shows proper ever get? You even see this in Ship of the Line itself, where Deanna wound up shuffled off stage, despite how VERY. MUCH. Bateson and his crew NEEDED therapy. Or the Equinox novelization, where Seven kept being referred to as “the girl” in narrative text, which I found infantilizing...
Yeah, okay, I’m turning this into ranting about an author I do not care for, so I’ll wrap this up now.
Also gonna cast a vote in the direction of much of Diane Carey’s works, for all the usual reasons, though while I could sit here and complain about how Ship of the Line is a sequel to about thirty seconds of an episode it actively contradicts, I want to shout out the way that the Descent novelization seems to actively undermine Crusher’s storyline, where Jeri Taylor wanted Crusher in the command chair to both utilize her some more and test the waters for a woman in the captain’s chair, while Carey seems to want to shove her out of that spotlight, not just by having her part in the episode end with her thinking she’s best suited for staying in Sickbay, but even an early added scene where Crusher talks about taking up knitting for no apparent reason.
Like I think about how Carey treats the women in her stories, and there does feel like this uncomfortable level of “stay in the kitchen while the men do the work” - the Piper duology and Fire Ship aside, how much of a role do the female characters from the shows proper ever get? You even see this in Ship of the Line itself, where Deanna wound up shuffled off stage, despite how VERY. MUCH. Bateson and his crew NEEDED therapy. Or the Equinox novelization, where Seven kept being referred to as “the girl” in narrative text, which I found infantilizing...
Yeah, okay, I’m turning this into ranting about an author I do not care for, so I’ll wrap this up now.
I remember a conversation I had with Dave Galanter many, many years ago about the terms "liberal" and "conservative." He said something about how these terms have meanings and he could never describe himself as a "liberal." And I pointed out to him that, no, that wasn't true. "You're a 'classical liberal,' Dave. We generally call that 'libertarian' today, but if you said you were a 'liberal,' you're not technically incorrect." To which he retorted, "Well, I could get away with that with you, and even then you'd have to think about it first." Which was true.
Warped the DS9 novel or Warped the TNG parody episode guide by Mike McMahan?
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