Hot on the heels of Diane Carey’s debut Trek novel Dreadnought! comes its sequel, the similarly exclamation-marked Battlestations!. A hot new (well, not totally new) technology has been stolen, and Piper’s friend and crewmate Sarda is the prime suspect. Can Piper clear his name, wrest the technology from the hands of those who would use it for evil, and save the day once again? And will she look as good doing all of it in her non-regulation khaki flight suit as she did in her non-regulation flared black jumper?
Month: May 2018 Page 1 of 2
For five months in 2016, I had an office job, and though I felt little of the kind of simmering negativity or existential dread one often sees in pop culture portrayals toward it while I was in it, in retrospect I can plainly see it was one of the worst jobs I ever had. I didn’t fully comprehend what I was doing or accomplishing, no one had time to break it down for me in a way that made sense to me, and I never figured out how to navigate the murky waters of office politics. Getting let go a week after Christmas turned out to be a huge relief, even as it meant job hunting again. I worked at Target for eight years prior to the office gig, and I would gladly return to retail at the drop of a hat before I tried to figure out office dynamics ever again.
Part of what we love so much about Star Trek, and the original series in particular, is the lived-in camaraderie between the senior officers. But it’s rarely considered by fans and authors alike that those relationships took time to develop and endured a heap of growing pains in the process. Enterprise: The First Adventure, the first instance of what we will come to know and recognize as the “event novel”, takes us back to a time before that rapport was locked in, when the crew we know as legendary were almost torn apart by the vagaries of the rumor mill and each other’s baggage before ever having a chance to become the chums we know and love, and imagines that ragtag bunch thrown together for the first time. Published exactly twenty years after Star Trek made its television debut, let’s join Kirk as he learns on a particularly stressful first outing that heavy lies the wrist that wears the command stripes.
This week, almost everyone on the Enterprise and most of the population of Vulcan fall prey to energy-based brain parasites that take over their minds, and it looks like the only cure is fresh air and exorcise. Will Spock, Bones, and the New Girl of the Week tell the parasites “Get behind me, Satan”, or will they succumb to the temptation to let them take over the galaxy? It’s J.M. Dillard’s Demons, or, Possession Is Nine-Tenths of the Crew.
I’m aware this is supposed to be the space where I talk about non-Trek culture, but I don’t know where or when else it will be relevant to revel in my delight that a woman, S.J. Clarkson, will direct the fourth Kelvin-timeline Trek film. Television and film Trek‘s track record of hiring female directors is, not to put too fine a point on it, abysmal: only six women have directed 35 episodes across all six live-action series, and Clarkson is the first female Trek film director period. But in the novelverse, as we know, it’s a different story. So far, the overwhelming majority of the books I’ve covered on this site have been written by women, and of the handful written by men, only one wasn’t hot garbage. As a matter of fact, thanks to doing Deep Space Spines, the majority of the books I’ve read in the last six months were written by women, and the influence is affecting my non-Trek reading as well. We all know women can do just fine with big-budget tentpole genre films, so I’m looking forward to seeing what Clarkson does with the franchise with her turn in the chair. (Now to actually get around to watching Beyond…)