Category: Reviews of Books
An all-new novel based on the landmark TV series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from the acclaimed author of A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe! Jadzia Dax has been a friend to Etom Prit, the Trill Trade Commissioner, over two lifetimes. A well done look into some pretty zany Trill backstories, all of which seem to involve the Dax symbiote in some way or another. This is a follow up to a couple plot lines introduced in the television show, one about how more Trill were eligible for implantation and one about a hidden and murderous past...
When an experimental shuttlecraft fails, Captain Christopher Pike suspects a mechanical malfunction—only to discover the very principles on which Starfleet bases its technology have simply stopped functioning. He and his crewmates are forced to abandon ship in a dangerous maneuver that scatters thei This is is one of the best Trek books that I’ve read in a while, with no offense intended towards the other ones that have come and gone. I’m somewhat surprised that I had such a great experience with it, as I recently read “Rogue Elements” and hated nearly everything about it, and both of them were...
The USS Enterprise has been granted the simple but unavoidable honor of ferrying key guests to Betazed for a cultural ceremony. En route, sudden tragedy strikes a Federation science station on the isolated planet Kota, and Captain Jean-Luc Picard has no qualms sending William Riker, Data, and Chief If you were to tell me that this was based on an unaired script for a few episodes, I’d believe it. There’s three distinct stories going on, one on Batazed, one on a potential colony planet during a survey, and one tracking down some stolen goods. All three are decent stories, but the one...
More than two centuries after World War III poisoned the planet, the final bastion of humanity lives on massive airships circling the globe in search of a habitable area to call home. Aging and outdated, most of the ships plummeted back to earth long ago. The only thing keeping the two surviving lifeboats in the sky are Hell Divers–men and women who risk their lives by skydiving to the surface to scavenge for parts the ships desperately need. When one of the remaining airships is damaged in an electrical storm, a Hell Diver team is deployed to a hostile zone...
In a desperate attempt to prevent the artificial intelligence known as Control from seizing crucial information that could destroy all sentient life, Commander Michael Burnham donned the “Red Angel” time-travel suit and guided the USS Discovery into the future and out of harm’s way. Starts off slow and in a manner that’s exceptionally similar to something that actually happened on the TV show, I think I need to rewatch season 4 in order to properly contextualize the meetings that Burnham has. I say it starts slow, but it definitely doesn’t stay that way, as this is more like a series...
Salvage vessel Cortes tracks the Lonely Orphan, a planet with no star system to call its own. Somewhere on this hostile rock is a payload fit for a king. To attain it, though, the crew of the Cortes must brave razor rock, poisonous vapors, treacherous footing, and… the most mind-numbing horrors imaginable. Struggling to stay alive, they are beset at every turn by horrors from their own nightmares. Now, they have discovered that they are not alone on the planet, and the other inhabitants welcome them… as sacrifices to an elder god. Stranded on a vicious, murderous, seemingly intelligent planet,...
A decade ago, 300,000 citizens of Philadelphia were suddenly lost in Oblivion. The government made every attempt to recover them, but after many years, they gav I stopped buying single comics that didn’t have “Star Trek” in their title right as this series was wrapping up and I just finally got the time to read through the final couple issues, and boy howdy do I wish I had stuck with the series when it was being published, just so I could have taken part in the discussions that were happening at the time about the resolution of the story. It...
From the pages of the AHOY interactive sensation STEEL CAGE! Penultiman, The Next-To-Last-Stage In Human Evolution, is the greatest, best-looking, and most admired super-hero in the world! So how can he stop hating himself? His android understudy, Antepenultiman, thinks he knows the answer! Created by Tom Peyer (THE WRONG EARTH) and Alan Robinson (PLANET OF THE NERDS). As with most books that nether overwhelm, nor underwhelm, I don’t have a ton to say about this series about a super hero that’s been kicked back to our more primitive time period from a far future where he was created by mistake...
Ten years after they landed. All over the world. And they did nothing, standing on the surface of the Earth like trees, exerting their silent pressure on the world, as if there were no-one here and nothing under foot. Ten years since we learned that there is intelligent life in the universe, but that they did not recognize us as intelligent or alive. Being a comic book fan sometimes means that you don’t get the full story that the creators intended, and I guess as much as the world loves Warren Ellis, that same world didn’t care for his “aliens...
Told through the eyes of Starship Trooper Johnny Rico, Robert A. Heinlein’s classic story of war and warriors is set 5000 years in the future. Not sure why I felt like I needed to reach this again, other than it popped up to the top of my Kindle list for some reason. It’s still one of the best military science fiction stories with nearly a third of the book taking place in boot camp and really only having a single real combat story element, but it’s tightly written and the world is so well made that I didn’t even notice...
