In today’s episode, if you don’t check the veracity of scary new rumors, you’ll look really bad later if they turn out to be true. But no matter how you slice it, while you’re away, the Klingons will play, and you’d better hope the folks you left home are up to the job. Does anyone in 2023 find the Garak/Bashir ship “puzzling”? What does the reading list to just be able to understand humans look like? And is this the fall of the house of Quark? All this and more in Vengeance, the book with the cover appearance so egregious it made me coin the word readbait.
The great film critic Gene Siskel used a clever litmus test to justify a movie’s existence. He would ask, “Is this movie more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch together?” Fan Fiction, a “mem-noir” nominally written by Brent Spiner, calls for a slightly modified version: “Is this style of writing more interesting than just a straightforward memoir?” The answer in this case, I think, is no.
In today’s episode, we’ll have a double order of Starfleet Academy, hold the artwork. Six cadets start out hyperventilating over a broken group project, but they soon go on to bigger, better, and much more dangerous things. How high is the bar for a Trill’s first host? How many swirlies did Harry Kim get as a cadet? And how many progressive points do Star Trek‘s first openly gay characters earn it? All this and more in The Best and the Brightest, the book that plays fast and loose with the Vulcan names.
In today’s episode, a worldwide transporter system represents a massive paradigm shift for the people of Birsiba. Unfortunately, it shifts their paradigms right over into the next universe. Now multiple Janeways must work together to stop the space vacuum conga. Why does only every other universe have a Voyager? Why are the differences between universes so trivial? And what’s the worst way to describe someone interrupting your dinner? All this and more in Echoes, the book with good B.O. genes.