There aren’t many roads to my heart faster than spicy food. I’ve been a spice fiend since I was a teenager, and I managed to turn my nephew into one while he was still in diapers. So when I saw Hot Sauce Nation: America’s Burning Obsession reviewed on my local library’s website, I knew I’d get a thrill from it, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Author: jess Page 61 of 68
After bearing the brunt of Khan’s wrath and then searching for Spock, the Enterprise crew must now face the music and begin the voyage home for their inevitable court martial. Unlike the last two films, however, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is very much a comedy, and this week we’re going to see how that affects the normally unflappable Vonda McIntyre’s approach to movie novelizations. So let’s make like the Enterprise and slingshot ourselves backwards through time to 1986, a world of heavy pollution, hard currency, and double dumbasses…
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?
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.