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?
Category: TOS Page 19 of 25
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.
This week, we meet Lt. Piper, who knocks the socks off the Kobayashi Maru and proves that, while orange may indeed be the new black, black is the new (command) gold. Will Kirk’s confidence in her talents pay off? How many OCs paralleling the main cast is too many? By what percentage does an exclamation point in the title make the book more exciting? We’ll seek the answers to those questions and more as we review Dreadnought!, or, Two Warp Nacelles Is Company, Three’s a War.
This week, we tackle a book that promises a lot more Joanna McCoy than it delivers. Plus: malfunctioning computers, antimatter holocaust, Uhura at the conn, and enough product placement to make an Adam Sandler film look like a paragon of subtlety. It’s Crisis on Centaurus, or, Mission to the Planet That’s Basically Earth But the Title Crisis on Earth Isn’t As Catchy or Compelling or Alliterative.