Deep Space Spines – Page 59 – A chronicle of the non-canonical since 2017.

In TOS

How Much for Just the Planet? serves up blue orange juice and inflatable rubber starships straight out the gate and only gets weirder from there. If you’re looking for the wackiest, goofiest, zaniest, most out-there Star Trek there is to be had, then you can stop drillin’, ’cause you struck oil. The only previous novel it has anything even remotely in common with is Ishmael, and even then, that’s only in the sense that there is absolutely no way, in this day and age when publishers are supremely and exclusively concerned with The Brand, that it would ever get published today. John M. Ford’s second and final Trek book is daring, clever, silly, wildly original, and like no Star Trek adventure before it or since.

I also do not like it very much.

#038: The Romulan Way (TOS #35)

By jess

On 6 July 2018

In TOS

You ever get to a point with food where you’re just completely over it? Like, nothing you can imagine sounds less appealing than eating or looking at food or thinking about food? That’s where I was with Romulans in Star Trek novels for a while. In the wake of Diane Duane’s first Rihannsu novel, a glut of stories featuring Romulans as the villains jammed up the publishing schedule—at one point, they figured into three of the four then-most recent stories—and though for the most part they acquitted themselves well enough, they just couldn’t hold a candle to Duane’s singular approach. (Though to be fair, not much can.) And now, just as I can feel my appetite for them returning, along comes Rihannsu number two—and it’s a meal fit for a Praetor.

Shore Leave #06: A Tuf Row to Hoe

By jess

On 3 July 2018

In Shore Leave

Shore Leave is the non-Trek culture arm of the Deep Space Spines website, posted every other Tuesday and made possible by donations to the site’s Patreon.

Image result for tuf voyaging At the behest of a coworker who’s been trying to convince me to read it since almost the beginning of my current job, I’m slowly chipping away at George R.R. Martin’s Tuf Voyaging, an episodic sci-fi novel published about a decade prior to his Game of Thrones fame explosion. I’m not very good at taking other people up on their recommendations—I almost always have to feel like I discovered something on my own to get into it, and the feeling to want to get into it has to come from me and me alone—but I decided that since I was able to persuade him to check out Oryx and Crake (which he inexplicably and incorrectly disliked), why not return the favor.

#037: Strangers from the Sky (TOS event novel)

By jess

On 29 June 2018

In Event Novels, TOS

Remember First Contact? Of course you do, it’s great. (At least, I recall that being the case. Not gonna lie, I’ll be kind of shook if it’s not when I revisit it.) Well, this week’s event novel is more like the supermarket tabloid version of that well-known tale. A tell-all book has just been released positing that the series of events generally accepted as Earth’s first exposure to Vulcan were in fact not as such, and that the real first contact happened twenty years prior. Meanwhile, Kirk and Spock have dreams, each independently of the other, that they were involved in the whole crazy shebang somehow. Were they? or is the book just that gripping?

#036: Dreams of the Raven (TOS #34)

By jess

On 22 June 2018

In TOS

This week, we’re taking a look at Carmen Carter’s debut Dreams of the Raven, which is in fact a Star Trek novel and not a Sting album (I double-checked). The Enterprise answers a distress call that turns out to be a trap, and the stress of both the resulting casualties and a letter that dredges up some unpleasant feelings drives McCoy to drink. Before you know it, Bones falls down and breaks his crown, and the ship comes tumbling after. Will Kirk get back his trusted friend and adviser? How will the junior medical officer who is a highly conspicuous stand-in for the author fare in his place? And will we see this book in our dreams, or will we put it back on the shelf and say “Nevermore”?

#039: How Much for Just the Planet? (TOS #36)

#038: The Romulan Way (TOS #35)

Shore Leave #06: A Tuf Row to Hoe

#037: Strangers from the Sky (TOS event novel)

#036: Dreams of the Raven (TOS #34)