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Sometimes I forget to write about these things when they happen, and a window slams shut before I know it. I forgot to do it when Rene Auberjonois died, and I forgot to do it when Aron Eisenberg died, and I still kick myself about both of them. But we’re not gonna let this one pass us by. This one hurts too much.

Nichelle Nichols, the absolute god-tier legend who played Lt. Nyota Uhura on the original series for its whole run, voiced her in the Animated Series, and played her in all six TOS movies, died of natural causes on July 31. She was 89.

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With the move to more sporadic, unstructured posting since entering grad school, some have asked for the RSS feed. Well, I found it way at the bottom of the page, so here it is more conveniently at the top. I’ll leave it stickied here for a while, then maybe move it over to the sidebar.

Happy holidays, and of course, live long and prosper.

I’m going to keep this post stickied for a while. New reviews will appear below it. Also, in case you’ve already read it, I’ve decided on another change to the publishing schedule since originally posting it. Now, going forward, since reviews are unlikely to come out on a weekly basis anyway, I’ll simply post them whenever I happen to finish them. Until I get a notification system set up, just check back frequently. I’ll try to set up a mailing list you can join relatively pain-free, though “R” in the comments suggests a neat way for setting that up yourself if you’re so inclined.

Attention, Bajoran readers:
I don’t talk about my own life much on here because it isn’t relevant to the proceedings. Except when it is. Like now.

One thing I said I would never do was go to grad school. It took my undisciplined ass long enough to get the bachelor’s to begin with, so I dismissed the idea of ever going back for any reason out of hand. Well, of course, in so doing, I teased fate, and it made an object lesson in “never say never” out of me.

Which is to say, I’m back in school getting my master’s in secondary education to become a high school English teacher.

So far, I find that the work is not itself any harder than any I’ve done in college before. What seems to make grad school work tougher is the demands it makes on my time, my focus, and my energy.

You can probably tell where this is going.

But in case you can’t, it means I’m pumping the brakes on Deep Space Spines a little. I’m still going to do it. But reviews might come out at a slower pace for the foreseeable future. School comes first.

Here’s how it’s going to go for now: I’m going to keep reading and writing where my spare time allows me to. I will still aim for a weekly post. But going forward, since reviews are unlikely to come out on a weekly basis anyway, I will just post them whenever I happen to finish them. 

We’ll see what that does to the production rate around here. It’s what’s most manageable for me right now, though.

Thanks so much for your continued support.

—Jess

Attention, Bajoran readers: I hate to do this, but I’m bumping this Friday’s review of John Peel’s Objective: Bajor off to next week. I’ve almost finished reading the book, but not quite, and I’m going out of town for a few days this weekend. I’ll finish the book and probably honestly get the whole review written at work tonight, but I’m going to delay posting it to give myself a chance to breathe easy on my vacation and create some buffer time to get ahead of the game again. Until then, peace.

Multiple sources, among them Trek scribes Michael Okuda and David Mack, have reported that Margaret Wander Bonanno has died in Los Angeles of natural causes. She was 71.

Her list of literary contributions to Star Trek is short but potent. She is often celebrated by both fans and colleagues for her portrayals of Vulcans in such novels as Dwellers in the Crucible, which examined the t’hy’la bond between Kirk and Spock through a feminine lens; the 2004 Lost Era novel Catalyst of Sorrows; and the event novel Strangers from the Sky, which numerous fans of extra-canonical Trek material uphold as their preferred version of the First Contact Day story. Up until Discovery, her 2006 novel Burning Dreams was widely considered the definitive treatment of the Christopher Pike character.

Bonanno’s third novel for Pocket Books was at the center of an infamous fiasco, in which her original manuscript of a sequel to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, submitted in 1990 and entitled Music of the Spheres, was thoroughly gutted by the editorial regime of the day and given over to a reluctant Gene DeWeese for a wholesale rewrite, which was eventually published in 1992 as Probe. However, because the covers had already been printed prior to the rewrite, hers was the name featured on the front of the book. Bonanno disowned the published product. A brief breakdown of the debacle is available on her website. She continued to make the original manuscript for Music of the Spheres available at no charge through email correspondence. Although that, needless to say, is no longer an option, a PDF can thankfully be easily procured.

Notable non-Trek works by Bonanno include the Others trilogy; a 1987 biography of Angela Lansbury; Saturn’s Child, a science fiction novel co-written with Nichelle Nichols; and the sci-fi trilogy Preternatural, the first book of which was edited by one Greg Cox, who called it “a weird, ambitious, metafictional, loosely autobiographical tour de force about a struggling midlist science fiction writer who may or may not actually be in contact with alien intelligences.”

Bonanno was one of Star Trek‘s finest authors, and she will be greatly missed.