Another week, another novel focusing on a new and never-before-seen character. Jean Czerny, an agricultural scientist, is captured by Klingons and forcibly recruited to solve their famine crisis. It’s the job she was born and bread for, but she can’t afford to loaf around. Will she ac-wheat-esce to the Klingons’ demands or go against the grain? This week, it’s Pawns and Symbols, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Klingons.
Remember when two daring authors named John M. Ford and Diane Duane created rich, dense histories and cultures for Klingons and Romulans from almost no raw materials whatsoever? Pepperidge Farm remembers. But so do some authors who came along later, like Margaret Wander Bonanno, who makes her debut here. Get ready for some of the Klingon-iest Klingons, Vulcan-iest Vulcans, and … well, there’s not much new or exciting going on with the Romulans, but they’re here, too.
Normally, I insert a “read more” tag after the intro paragraph of a review to generate some suspense and keep from filling the main page with walls of text, but this is the first time it’s actually serving a third purpose of hiding some most likely NSFW material. Buckle up, banditos, because we’re about to go behind the velvet curtain in the back of the video store, and you’re going to find out what happens when an author commits the 80s literary equivalent of getting horny on main.
When you consider how protective (some might say possessive) today’s entertainment companies get regarding their intellectual properties, decades that can be at least semi-reasonably described as “recent” may start to look like an untamed hinterland. For instance, part of me often looks back with fondness on that roughly 15-year window where no one gave two figs about anything anyone did with Star Wars. As more and more properties come under the purview of fewer and fewer owners, it seems decreasingly likely that we will see cross-media appearances that are not planned down to the minutest legal, financial, and social media details, much less the reckless abandon of a product like Ishmael, a novel that so gleefully mixes in cameos and references from other properties that any legal team today would tear it to shreds before the first copy came off the presses.
Occasionally, it happens that someone who is otherwise a perfectly decent and talented writer just can’t nail down that Star Trek vibe. We’ve seen it before. For someone who only wrote one Star Trek novel, Laurence Yep has exceptional pedigree: he’s won a Newbery Medal and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, among other accolades, and he’s written a ton of highly praised books and series for children that are steeped in Chinese lore. But that doesn’t necessarily guarantee adequate characterizations and interesting stories in other universes.
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén
